I am a futures anthropologist whose research centers on anticipated changes within human society. I seek to understand what gains can be made for humanity in various future scenarios, what aspects we must preserve to safeguard what I refer to as ‘sustainable humanity,’ and what is at risk of being lost and who stands to lose. One of the important themes in my work is love because intimacy–whether that be in a romantic, sensual, or friendly manner–is innate to the human experience. In my work, I wonder: if the experience of love changes, does this mean we, as humans, are also changing?
I wrote
Six in a Bed: The Future of Love - from Sex Dolls and Avatars to Polyamory
I loved this book, as it describes one of the biggest problems of our day and age: that we are both superconnected and no longer connected at all. By that, I mean that we are constantly digitally stimulated.
We are in touch with friends, colleagues, and strangers, but because of that, we are too tired to truly connect to the important people around us and even with ourselves.
A bold, hopeful, and thought-provoking account by “one of the world’s leading thinkers” (The Observer) of how we built a lonely world, how the pandemic accelerated the problem, and what we must do to come together again
“A compelling vision for how we can bridge our many divides at this time of great change and disruption.”—Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global
“An important new book.”—The Economist
NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED (UK) AND THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Loneliness has become the defining condition of the twenty-first century.…
The timing could not have been better: I read this book in a hammock while doing fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon, where I was supposed to study how Indigenous peoples imagine the future and envisage the role of technology in their future lives.
It took several days on a slow boat to arrive at the research location, and meanwhile, I read a book that shocked me from the title onwards: each of us has, on average, 4000 weeks to spend in this life. What do we want to spend these weeks on? According to the author, we often want to do too much: we want to be a parent, a good partner, a funny person to our followers on Instagram, a smart colleague, a person who goes to the gym, and a friend who is in for spontaneous coffee dates.
Rather than offering his readers productivitytips that promise us that we can indeed combine all of these aims and activities, Burkman asks the hard questions: what should we drop, what are our priorities, if we want to live a deeply fulfilling life? In my case, I decided that being in this hammock and reading this book was all I wanted for this particular week.
"Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." ―Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal
The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.
Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of…
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to…
We have all heard that social media and other modern technologies are not good for us, but Turkle explains exactly why and how such technologies impact our well-being.
I am a mother of a toddler daughter, and even though, through my work as a future anthropologist, I was far from naïve about the impact of technology, I was still shocked to read what cell phones and laptops do to our children's brains. The book convinced me to be extra conscious of how I raise my daughter in a digital age.
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle argues, as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Even the presence of sociable robots in our lives that pretend to demonstrate empathy makes us feel more isolated, as Turkle explains in a new introduction updating the book to…
Some books affirm, and some books expand your thinking. This book belongs to the second category. Jenkins explores a new definition of love and tries to make that concept more inclusive than it currently is. This new definition of love is necessary, I believe, because as time changes, so does our experience of love.
What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is , philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations) we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently…
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
Hochschild is a sociologist, exploring modern types of jobs that commercialize human emotions. Think of flight attendants or bill collectors: people who have to smile at clients or remain polite, even if these clients make that very hard. Hochschild shows the impact of such acting; I use her insights in my work on sex work.
In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work", just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart. But what occurs when…
The futures anthropologist Roanne van Voorst spent three years researching love’s fluid landscape and immersing herself in today’s latest trends to gain insight into the human of tomorrow. She cultivated a virtual friendship, hired a rentable friend and an erotic masseuse, shared a bed with sex dolls and flirted with artificial intelligence. She dated and danced in a virtual world, spoke to polyamorists, sologamists, sex workers, pansexuals, asexuals, heterosexuals, homosexuals, men, women, and people who don’t accept the binary gender label. She wanted to know how changes to love are changing our species. This book is her brilliantly engaging answer. https://anthropologyofthefuture.com/the-emic/
Every picture tells a story, but it’s not always the one we expect or remember. Christmas Actually is a festive drama about family and forgiveness and a snapshot of modern family life, addressing Instagram to motherhood and everything in between.
Why Christmas? My publisher wanted my new novel to have…
When we're children, we're asked what we want to be when we grow up. But what if there isn't just one career for us in our lifetime? What if we can have a squiggly line career that spans professions and industries?
