Nate Hagens

In this week’s Frankly, Nate offers the third episode in his series on staying human, this time focused on presence. Nate shares a personal reflection on presence and its importance in a reality where we are constantly living in anticipation of the future.

Opening with a personal reflection on his own relationship to dread, Nate describes how the chronic anticipation of collapse affects the human nervous system long before any single crisis fully arrives.

Nate invites listeners to view the constant churn of headlines through a wider-boundary lens. He begins with the misleading framing of recent oil production statistics by the United States, which blurs distinctions between crude oil and broader petroleum products.

Nate Hagens steps away from analysis and reflects on a call that reframed his thinking. He shares a recent conversation with a close friend living in Lebanon, who, amid ongoing daily violence and loss, has been hosting displaced families and leading meditation practices in her community.

Nate Hagens expands on the case for holding a distribution of possible futures rather than a single preferred one, and walks through a structured scenario-building exercise.

In the first instalment of a new series on thinking about the future, Nate Hagens argues that most debates about what lies ahead are shaped by a single competing narrative. He introduces “scenario thinking” as a way to hold multiple possible futures at once, and explores why this is psychologically and culturally difficult in practice.