I have seen the future. People are paid a basic income to escape ‘labourism’

At London’s Southbank Centre this month, conversations will take place to shape the future of the biggest
issues we face today – from housing, education, climate and relationships with one another and ourselves. 

Three thought leaders – actor and activist Fehinti Balogun, author and screenwriter Juno Dawson and economist and supporter of a Universal Basic Income Guy Standing – write letters to their past from their future selves.

Fehinti Balogun

I’ve written to you at one of many moments in your life where your perspective is about to change. It’s 2010. You’re 14 years old, at your first National Youth Theatre course. Everyone is very nice but, more importantly, they’re weird. Weird in the same way you are. They’re loud, and singing. They say how they feel but, more importantly, feel what they say.

Someone will connect to the speaker and play the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. Everyone without missing a beat will pick up a stick and play out sword-fighting scenes. You’ll do it too. And you won’t realise it but in that moment something changes in you. 

You are allowed to play. You are around other people who play. You can be big. You can be weird. You won’t know this yet but most people in the world don’t feel like you. Like that room. You feel the need to play deeply. In fact, you feel everything deeply. Whereas most of the world has in some way been hardened. They won’t feel as deeply full stop.

I’m sorry to tell you this but you are going to feel everything. You are going to empathise with everyone. And it will be awful. Your first break-up will be so overwhelming you will hide under the stairs near what was the Co-op outside Rada. You will cry when trees are cut down, and you will develop a deep level of anxiety about the world and how awful it can be. 

At your worst this sensitivity will feel like a curse, but at its best you’ll change lives.

Because you will develop a deep sense of justice. That will make you create work, write speeches and argue with your mum and record it. Secretly turning that into a TED talk, that then becomes a touring play and a load of songs, all of which you’ll share at the UN and Scottish parliament.

Because of that empathy you will understand characters in a way many people won’t. You will build a craft. You’ll fall in love with it. You’ll realise your job as an artist is to feel deeply and report to the world what it’s really like. To give others the permission to feel, and to play. 

You will learn that you being weird, and sensitive, and geeky, and black is a radical act and exactly what the world needs.

And I’m sorry that the person you’ll have to take this lesson from is you. I’m sorry no one comes to save you. But I promise you, you will feel seen, you will make work that changes others. You will achieve lifelong dreams and you’ll handle break-ups so much better than the first time.

Keep investing stocks in your weirdness. Remember that when you feel so deeply what you feel is only a part of a vast spectrum you have access to, a fire that is yours. A blaze that spreads further than you’ll ever know.

Read more:

• Roger McGough: ‘Poetry is within all of us’
• Children’s author Jacqueline Wilson: ‘Reading is becoming niche – like stamp collecting’
• Ncuti Gatwa: Doctor Who reminds me that there is always hope

Juno Dawson

Dear Juno James,

Whoops! That’ll make sense in about 15 years. Don’t sweat it just now. So, if I’m right, you’re reading this in Year 10. Things are awful right now. No, don’t lie. I am future you. You don’t have to pretend to me. It was not OK. Your school failed you, and a lot of your friends, in acts of sheer negligence. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but school finishes and everything gets better.

Right now, you’re trying so hard to work yourself out. You think everyone else has received some secret instruction manual for being a person, while you somehow missed the pamphlet. You’re convinced that if you find a correct way to dress, speak and behave all the pain will stop. That’s true, actually, but the ‘correct way’ isn’t what you think it is, baby!

You will spend years trying to fit in. Stop, now. If they’re going to talk about you, give them something to talk about. Their words hurt, so you know the power of words, but you come to use them for good. They can make someone laugh when they desperately need to. They can give shape to a feeling they couldn’t name. You will make so many lost teenagers realise that they are not the only person in the world who feels different.

All this to say you’ll become a writer. I know that sounds impossible when you think Miss Walker’s English classes are dull as fuck, but you do love reading, and you love books. You love stories. You love performing. Even though you won’t have a single qualification in them, you go on to be a writer and actor. I know! Bitch, you’re on TV! It’s not easy though. There will be rejection letters. There will be bad reviews. There will be searing jealousy at seeing people that work a fraction as hard as you do go further and faster. That’s how TV and publishing go. Write anyway, you’re good at it! And keep watching Doctor Who. Buy the videos. Watch them to death. It comes in handy.

What do I wish I’d known? Would knowing have changed anything? You arrive at certain things late. Your twenties are… messy. I’m not sure I would trade those years for certainty or clarity. Like some vespertine flower, you bloom in the evening.

Your work is important. You can’t say that in the present because it would make you insufferable, but I think it’s worth you knowing. The words you write reach people; they change people. What an incredible gift, and enormous responsibility. 

So here is what I want you to know most of all: you are not behind. There is no timetable for becoming yourself. One last thing. You work HARD. If I have one request it’s this: stop and smell the flowers. Slow down every once in a while and look at the things you, a weird kid from Bingley, have achieved.

You will do the most extraordinary things. I said no spoilers, but hear this: As of 2026, you have met THREE OF THE SPICE GIRLS. I know, right? Be you soon…

Juno

Guy Standing (writing to himself in 2026 from 2036)

2026 was a moment of political darkness, with a mad tyrant in the White House and blighted by a polycrisis – global burning, genocide in Palestine and Sudan, chronic inequalities and growth of a new mass class, the precariat, facing chronic insecurity.

Looking back, I marvel at the transformation since then. Now, I am happy to say, we have a society in which most of us are doing more work that those ‘labourists’ did not recognise as work and that were not counted in that fetish of the 2020s, GDP ‘growth’. 

The economically and socially most valuable form of work, unpaid care, was then given a value of zero. Now, with an ageing society, we know how valuable is the work we do caring for those we love.  What facilitated the escape from labourism was the introduction of Common Dividends, regular basic incomes paid unconditionally to every individual, with a lower amount for children and a supplement for people with disabilities. This allowed people to do more work that was not labour, such as growing fruit and vegetables on all the extra allotments we have today.  

The impetus for this was a combination of three seismic factors. First, there were worries that Artificial Intelligence would wipe out jobs. I knew AI would increase inequalities and the size and indebtedness of the precariat. A new income distribution system was vital. Second, climate change was finally accepted as the looming threat to humanity that had to be confronted if our children and grandchildren were to have lives worth living. New taxes were introduced on activities causing pollution and depletion of the commons. These helped pay for the Common Dividends that reduced the inequalities and insecurities that defined the 2020s. Third, our education system had been captured by finance and converted into a vast parasitic industry geared to preparing ‘human capital’. It was not preparing people to be good citizens, or creative, critical thinkers essential for society to thrive. So it was overhauled. These reforms put us on the road to a good society.

Guy Standing’s The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty (£10.99), and Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons (£12.99) are both out now (Penguin)

Letters to the Future is on 18-20 September at the Southbank Centre

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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