Thread by @nytimes

1/ What would you ask yourself in a year? That’s what the Headway team wants to know.

Here’s why they’re asking… nyti.ms/3AzTJlx

2/ In December, the New York Times’s Headway team asked people to review predictions from decades ago about extreme poverty, the spread of HIV, carbon emissions and other big challenges and to guess at how the future had played out.

They made a quiz: nyti.ms/3G9JHZX

3/ Headway asked our readers what had surprised them about the outcomes.

Many of the thousand-plus responses they received said the quiz caused them to question whether they had been too pessimistic about the world. nyti.ms/3G9JHZX

4/ This probably isn’t a shock.

While Headway is exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, at this particular moment in the life of our species that lens is suspect. nyti.ms/3AzTJlx

5/ When Headway reported on the outcomes of past forecasts, they weren’t looking for positive trends or surprising accomplishments, just lessons from the past about our capacity to envision and shape the future. The lessons they found were complicated. nyti.ms/3AzTJlx

6/ This sentiment from a respondent in Houston struck a common chord: “Progress has left many behind and the work will always be incomplete, but looking at past predictions and where we are today, I have hope for our future, naïvely or not.” nyti.ms/3AzTJlx

7/ Many respondents noted that keeping an eye on the movement of major global issues is difficult in light of the many daily emergencies clamoring for our attention in our communities.

“A lot of large-scale progress is not visible to us on an individual level,” one noted.

8/ And it doesn’t help, many wrote, that the day-to-day news is so much more attention-grabbing than the glacial, halting movement on large challenges.

“Slow, incremental progress is boring,” observed a writer from Colorado.

9/ What Headway realized was that progress is impossible to detect — much less make — without fixing our attention toward a possible future and carefully measuring our movement toward or away from it. nyti.ms/3AzTJlx

10/ Now Headway wants to shift our gaze to the future and would like your help on another small experiment: What would you ask yourself in a year? nyti.ms/3AzTJlx

11/ Headway will also ask you what your hopes and fears are for how the future will play out. And in a year, they’ll follow up with the 2023 version of you to ask what happened and what Future You took from it. nyti.ms/3AzTJlx