The Silver Lining in Civilizational Survival Uncertainty

In 2008 I was an oil analyst at the Korea Energy Economics Institute. I was in a group private thread with the head of DOE EIA and some very famous oil analysts (10 of us - I knew my shit). I had opinions. I was wrong.

What 2008—and the world I imagined would follow—taught me is that the future does not unfold by extending today forward. It often emerges by illuminating paths we did not know existed.

In 2008, the picture looked dark. With oil at $147 per barrel, almost no spare production capacity (takes 5 years to add more capacity at minimum), and a global economy pressing directly against physical energy limits, it felt like humanity was running out of room. Every serious projection pointed toward pain and conflict. There simply did not appear to be enough energy headroom to support continued growth.

Then shale arrived from a convergence of technologies, capital markets, risk tolerance, and timing that almost no one could have confidently described in advance. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, data-driven reservoir modeling, and cheap capital aligned in a way that escaped our most creative imaginations on what the future would entail. What looked like a hard boundary on the limit of oil turned out to be intelligent people trying to sound smart by being practical and conservative on our potential. These people and those practical personality types are of no use when it comes to predicting the future. They always predict wrong.

That is the lesson I learned. When the world looks darkest, it is often because we are staring at the edge of our current imagination. No one can imagine the future so accurately, not even those among us. Ego would have us lie to ourselves to believe otherwise should we let it, which we don’t. The future we imagine feels absolute because our Egos and our anxieties want to believe it: even if that feels self-destructive. Sometimes our biological/chemical brain programming is. Innovation does not arrive to answer to the question we are asking. It arrives by changing the question entirely. Almost no imagination can capture that question.

This is why I no longer anchor myself to specific forecasts of the future. The most important shifts are not linear extensions of what we know; they are phase changes. They occur when multiple domains intersect in ways that are invisible until after the fact. No amount of intelligence or modeling can reliably predict them, because they depend on combinations of ideas that have not yet met.

The darkness of 2008 was real. But it was not the end of the story. It was the precondition for something radically different to appear. The pain we felt then was necessary to create the fertile ground for the innovation that followed. And that pattern repeats. The moments that feel most constrained are often the ones closest to transformation we cannot yet name.

That is why I prefer uncertainty to certainty. A future we can know is a future I do not want to experience. I prefer a blank canvas that scares all of us because we cannot see what comes next. That to me is the kind of certain I want, because it is one we can personally shape and take ownership over, instead of betting on an invisible humanity that is not real. There is no other taking care of it. That does not exist. Certainty locks us into defending a picture of the future that reality is already preparing to destroy. Uncertainty keeps us open to the possibility that the next source of light will come from a direction we are not even looking, or one that we create ourselves. That is the kind of future I want. Nothing easy. Nothing certain. Lots of responsibility. Lots of ambiguity on what will work, what we have to do, and how to get there. That is a purpose I can get behind.