Full house this week.

Children, grandchildren, and their partners. Six of them in total. They’re on vacation, enjoying the lazy life back at Mom and Dad’s house. The refrigerator is impossible to keep stocked as they move between the pool, the beach, the gym, and restaurants.

They have their own homes, jobs, cars, and motorcycles. They work as a model, product owner, executive assistant, and restaurant owner.

And meanwhile, their father and grandfather is sitting there, writing stories about their future.

My granddaughter gave me a guilty smile when I asked whether she reads my stories. They never appear in her social media feed. Too long. Too much text. No crazy videos.

I don’t blame her. We’ve built a world where almost all information about the future flows through commercial algorithms. Social media companies don’t make money from truth, nuance, or context. They make money from attention.

Their goal isn’t to inform people better. It’s to keep us watching one more video, making one more click, seeing one more ad. That’s simply their business model.

Topics like climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality, and AI must compete in a world optimized for attention, not understanding.

By the way, I like dog videos too.

Europe is trying to curb the power of the major platforms. Necessary, in my opinion. But serious information has also become harder for young people to reach. Posts about climate change or inequality are sometimes blocked or denied promotion. Education faces the same question: how do you prepare a generation for a world changing faster than any textbook can keep up with?

Sometimes I wonder whether a seventy-three-year-old father and grandfather can still make a meaningful contribution.

But then I look at my six-month-old grandson Ayden and realize he could still be alive a hundred years from now.

I see people standing up for nature, democracy, climate, and equal opportunity. I see students asking what kind of world their children will inherit. I see entrepreneurs who don’t see sustainability as marketing, but as something completely natural.

They are out there. They just make less noise than the algorithms.

Looking back from the future, it turned out that it wasn’t the loudest voices that changed the world. It was the people who kept believing the future mattered.

In The Only Possible Solution, dedicated to my grandson Ayden, I reached a conclusion that surprised even me. After a lifetime of hard work, family is all that really matters. Not your money. Not your house. Not your possessions. Only the people you love.

I love my children and grandchildren with all my heart. Even if we don’t always understand each other’s worlds.

Maybe they’ll read my books one day.

But if they ever wonder why their grandfather kept writing all those years, I hope they’ll know the answer.

Not out of fear. But out of love.Back From The Future is a series in which I look back from the year 2125 at the choices we are making today.