The Future in 2025: Balancing Hope and Realism

At the end of any year, there is a temptation to look back and explore what went right and what was not so successful, to reflect and perhaps lament, but also to assess so that we can get a better sense of our immediate futures. However, I want to take a slightly different approach with my thoughts this morning. I want to think about what might be possible in 2025 if we continue to believe and dream the dreams we wish and need. No one has a crystal ball or a magic wand, and none of us is ever capable of being more than just a soothsayer or a dreamweaver. Yet, at times like this, one must think positively to develop a prognosis of likely outcomes and realities in the world, which is complex, fraught, misaligned, and for some, in a deeply precarious position.

The main problem is one of framing. Much of what we think about is framed by who we think we are, based on our immediate surroundings and the realms of influence in relation to individuals and ideologies that shape our immediate surroundings. This is an obvious enough statement, yet it is crucial to remind ourselves of it, given how our dominant framing perspectives present us with worldviews that are somewhat constrained in reality. I say this because there is so much that can be said about the challenges that could frame our view in a way that indicates hopelessness and the likely outcomes of failure. This would put me in the frame of a doomsayer who has very little good to say about people and politics, when there is so much that isn’t working. And so, what is working, and what can we look forward to in the 2025 new year, which should be full of promise and hope, and it would be if it weren’t for so many middle-aged hacks like me who’ve become old and grumpy.

First off, the inevitable global realignment in the light of “Westlessness” continues to reveal itself as we find Western nations increasingly turning to protectionist, exclusivist, populist, and authoritarian norms as a way to shore up the ideological, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual imaginations that prop them up as the arbiters of all that is right and decent. This ultimately maligns the rest of the world as somehow incapable or still too far behind to know what is good for itself, thus confirming the need for the West to act as the world’s authority on all matters. But this is clearly changing, and rather rapidly in some ways. The rise of BRICS is testament to the fact that global nations are organizing themselves, trading in their own currencies, and putting their own national interests collectivized as a global south entity in ways that have been seen before. There is always the risk of cronyism and elitism, and the reproduction of ideas that are essentially Western but with an Eastern cloth wrapped around them. Of course, the outcomes here are yet to be fully determined, but if the approach is fair and just, the likelihood of more developmental, balanced thinking in relation to economy and society will help the rest of the world to even out its position in relation to the globe, improving the lot of the many rather than the few.

The populations in these countries are considerable, given the rather stark decline in the global north, including the fact of low birth rates, which necessarily require immigration. However, the politics of many northern countries doesn’t quite fully appreciate this enough to be able to determine policies that are effective for all contained within those countries. Some of this is about a lack of imagination; some of this is also about the lingering impacts of the desire to maintain a certain kind of “westfulness” despite all that is going on in the rest of the world. There are opportunities that are exciting and future-oriented, but there are also risks as the West holds onto what it knows best, and the new global south repeats the mistakes of the West in terms of elitism, cronyism, exceptionalism, and self-selection biases.

The other heartbreaking reality is the situation in the Middle East, particularly in relation to the occupied territories of Palestine and the implications it has for Palestinians who have suffered immeasurably throughout 2024 and continue to do so as I write this note. Double standards, hypocrisy, iniquity, and the sheer blasé attitudes of Western political powers must shift. The suffering is unimaginable; the cruelty is beyond all realms of barbarity, and yet it persists. While one must not let it get one down too much, it’s hard not to, for it has gone on for far too long. The misreporting, misdirection, and misinformation by dominant and often reliable media and political actors continues, despite the efforts of the many and the voices of those who should be heard as leading authorities, whether medical, judicial, humanitarian, or individual. And yet they continue to be ignored, and worse, demonized and ultimately excluded. This cannot go on anymore. It’s crises like these that make one lose faith in humanity. 2025 needs to be the year that leads to genuine solutions to this longstanding problem, but I fear there isn’t anybody left who is decent enough, moral enough, and capable enough to make the solution happen. Europe has faded considerably in the light of the impact of the policies in response to the economic crisis of 2008 and the lack of political hegemony after the moving aside of Angela Merkel, who had put Europe on the global map firmly and squarely. Germany is crumbling politically; France is weak politically. These major players in the European Union are weaker than they have ever been. The Netherlands, which is the country of my place of work, has shifted towards a far-right discourse in such an accelerated way that it’s hard to keep up with some of the ongoing political machinations by actors who are clearly disconnected from the realities on the ground. Britain was a leading player in the European Union but it decided to impose sanctions on itself in the form of Brexit, which few in the UK wish to talk about anymore, but it remains one of the most disastrous policy outcomes to have faced the nation in the post-war period. It’s probably why so few people want to talk about it because it’s such a woeful act of self-immolation. World powers need to get their acts together and sort this mess out in the Middle East in a way that doesn’t put their own self-interests first every time. This requires a radical departure from the status quo, but it needs to be urgently done.

While much of this concentrates on geopolitics and international affairs, what about people in their ordinary circumstances? Inequality in the West is greater than it’s ever been. Wealth has trickled upwards and not trickled down, as the neoclassical neoliberal free-market model was trying to suggest, but it was always going to be doomed because, essentially, people are greedy and tribalistic and don’t want to share. Ordinary people continue to suffer in ways that are growing significantly, such that their incomes do not have the purchasing power that they did a generation ago—such that their relative incomes in terms of real wage effects haven’t really increased over the last two decades, despite inflationary pressures in all sectors of the economy. Ordinary people have lost trust and faith in politics and have tended more and more to take their information, not from once-reliable sources such as mainstream television news, but rather from social media influences and actors that can also deviate and divest from the truth in order to encourage individuals to click and watch in states of anxiety in order to monetize people’s attention spans, which are rapidly fading in the light of doomscrolling, leading to text neck and people’s brains being overcooked on dopamine overdose, leading them unable to reflect. Instead, they are primed to react. While some social media has produced huge opportunities in relation to activism and information that would not be accessible or available in mainstream news, these social media channels are being attacked and potentially cancelled by nations that are unwilling to allow an alternative view to gain hold, such that it might challenge the status quo. Individual people need to be empowered so that they can make up their own minds freely, rather than in a constrained, pressurized, limited space that reduces individuals to taking up polarized perspectives in order to feel that they belong to something distinct. There is much damage that the main social media outlets have done to individual behavior that continues to persist, and few are going to challenge this reality unless they take it up upon themselves to make those steps on their own terms through their own individual knowledge-building.

I wanted to write this piece in a way that encourages positive action from myself, from being stuck in a space that considers the future in much more bleaker terms than I perhaps I ought to. But in the end, it’s clear that the weight of the challenges facing the world, nations, and individuals are far too heavy to let go, despite the desire, the need, the hope, and the wish for change. If anything, the latter cannot be let go, and if anything comes out of this piece, it’s to argue that we must persist with positive change for the greater good, no matter what. We know what to do and how to do it, and we should just get on with it!!