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On Being, Thinking and Doing in the Future Present
Welcome to Being Future Present
My name is Jeff Long. I am a digital nomad currently living in Washington State, Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Georgia, Switzerland, Des Moines, Iowa. I build with technology, and teach people how to create meaningful lives in the AI age.
Futures Past
Since as long as I can remember, I’ve been thinking about the future. Maybe it was the Buck Rogers comic books, or the Radio Shack electronics I grew up with. And as long as I can remember, I have had a computer around me. When I was 10, it was a Bally Astrocade video game console with a cartridge that allowed me to program in the Basic language.
The Recent Past
This combination of technology plus future-tense mindset served me well in 2020.
During the spring of my 20th year as a teacher, I was paying close attention to what was happening with Italy. So close, that I learned how to rewind Google News day-by-day and collect numbers on the spread of Covid, and look for what tipping point caused Italy to make the dramatic decision to close schools.
I created a spreadsheet with my numbers, and lined up the dates, and came to a sober conclusion. The next day on the playground, I told my fellow teachers: “We aren’t coming back to school after this weekend.” No one could believe it. But the numbers didn’t lie.
The pandemic changed everyone. How did it change me? Two years later, I boarded a plane to Europe. I quit my job, sold everything, rented out my house, and bought a one-way ticket to Corfu, Greece. There I boarded a ferry and spent three months in Sarande, Albania with my wife Deana.
What was I going to do? I didn’t know yet. But I knew that my future did not include public school teaching. We went on from Albania to Cyprus, then Greece, and ended at the largest digital nomad festival in the world: Bansko, Bulgaria.
Being Present
I learned a lot on that first 10 month trip, living in Europe. One of the most important was starting to meditate.
At first it was a 3-minute exercise of breathing in and out, following the rhythm set by the meditation app on my Apple watch.
Then I progressed through the 7-day guided lessons on the Insight Timer app. 1 By the time I got to Cyprus, I was practicing daily lessons led by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.
Today, my practice is about an hour long, give or take. It includes both Vipassana style mindfulness, Orthodox Nepsis, and religious reading.
The Future
The other big change that happened in Albania was my first experiments with ChatGPT. It was terrible then, but it was hinting at what was to come.
Like other humanities professionals, I found I had a latent capability to use AI, because it’s primary language is human language, unlike previous computer programming. Proper word choice, grammar and syntax can make AI sing.
I spent the next years growing in my AI abilities, first with ChatGPT, and then Google Gemini.
When I returned to Albania last year, I met a new friend who introduced me to Anthropic Claude, and suddenly I was building databases, running analytics, and creating apps.
Being Future Present
Like everyone else, I believe our economy is being transformed by this technology so growing in our skills will help us navigate this new world.
Aside from the opportunities, there are massive uncertainties that everyone is feeling, myself included.
Here I found the topic I wanted to pour myself into:
The application of mindfulness with the uncertainty of our future.
We can no more wish away an unknowable AI future than we can wish away a storm.
You can prepare for a storm. But if you spend all your energy on the storm, you miss the magic of the present moment.
We must learn to be future present.
I have three themes to guide me:
Being. When you see photos of me in museums, beaches, with family and friends, you are seeing me being. When I talk about meditation, prayer, or reading, I am talking about being. And I will encourage you to do lots of it.
Thinking. We are living during a crisis of meaning. Not only do we wonder about the purpose of life in the AI age, but we wrestle to collectively define the meaning of common words. We need to not just Know Thyself, but also work together towards a shared common future. This requires thinking. Lots of it. I will guide you through some of the topics we need to think about in order to do a better job at being.
Doing. The ever-presence of digital devices has created an unprecedented degree of distraction leading to an epidemic of attention dysfunction. As a digital nomad and independent contractor, I have had to learn to make decisions about what to do next while fighting the urge to pick up my phone. Claude and Gemini have become superpowers for me, but they are not without their own peril. I am not interested in productivity for the sake of improving my efficiency and increasing the corporate bottom-line. I will talk about how I build with AI and use other tools to help me accomplish meaningful work which frees me up to think and be.
I hope you will join with me Being Future Present
https://insighttimer.com/