The problem this solves
The next decade's personal decisions — about work, money, location, family — are increasingly shaped by forces most adults don't track: emerging technologies, surveillance capabilities, energy and supply chains, the slow-moving reorganisation of global power. The news shows you the dramatic surface; the structural shifts move beneath it.
This micro-course teaches the calibrated read. What to track, what to ignore, how to distinguish slow-moving consequence from short-lived noise. The goal isn't prediction; it's being the kind of reader who can make personal decisions that survive multiple plausible versions of the next ten years.
A taste of the exercise
The preview lesson walks you through writing your personal exposure map — the three or four structural shifts most likely to affect your specific life — and the one robust move you can make this quarter against the highest-priority one.
Key concepts
- Structural vs cyclical
- Structural shifts (demographics, technology adoption, energy transitions) move slowly and matter for decades. Cyclical events (elections, market moves, scandals) dominate the news and matter much less for personal planning.
- Surveillance posture
- What can plausibly be tracked, by whom, and with what consequence. Has changed materially over the past decade and continues to change.
- Concentration risk
- When a small number of companies or countries control critical infrastructure (compute, energy, key chokepoints), small shocks can produce large consequences.
- Deglobalisation signals
- Indicators of supply chains, capital flows, and trade patterns reorganising. Affect prices, jobs, and personal logistics over years.
- Information warfare
- Deliberate deployment of disinformation, synthetic media, and amplification as instruments of state and corporate power. Increasingly normal.
- Personal exposure mapping
- Honestly assessing which structural shifts most directly affect your specific life, then planning for those rather than for whatever's in the news this week.
Common mistakes
- Tracking cyclical news at the expense of structural shifts.
- Doomerism that paralyses rather than informs.
- Optimism that ignores tail risks.
- Treating one country's news as universal.
- Believing your personal life is ‘not political enough to matter.’
- Reading only your political tribe.