Authoring the Future
I’m Curtis Watson, a retired therapist and independent researcher exploring how people retain agency while living within constraint and uncertainty.
If this is your first time here, I suggest scrolling down the page. You’ll find some explanation of the site and a few directions for exploring it.
The website has three main areas.
The Museum
The largest area is the Museum of Ideas—a collection of questions, observations, arguments, experiments, and unfinished ideas I’ve been working with.
This is really the heart of the site and the part I expect will continue growing.
As I get older, I find myself increasingly interested in trying to understand some of the mysteries of life—or at least the mysteries as I see them. I don't expect to solve most of them, but I enjoy looking.
The Gift Shop
The Gift Shop is a collection of things I hope might be useful.
These are more practical and grounded ideas drawn largely from things I found helpful during my earlier professional life. Some will be simple tools, some educational materials, and eventually perhaps a few courses and other resources.
Think of it as the practical side of the Museum.
Coaching
The third area is my coaching practice, for people who may want to work with me directly.
I intentionally keep a small coaching clientele.
I call my approach Existential Coaching. It is designed to help people figure out where they want to go, understand the constraints they are actually working within, and find practical ways of moving toward their goals in the present century.
Maybe we can make fun of our solutions in the next one.
Please feel welcome to explore any or all of the site.
You don't have to agree with me. In fact, I hope you'll question some of it.
My goal is to create a place where people can explore ideas, find something useful, and perhaps leave thinking a little differently than when they arrived.
I spent many years as a therapist helping people make changes in their lives. I would rather not say exactly how many years, because I still want people to believe I am younger than I am.
Over that time, I became fascinated by how people make decisions, how relationships and circumstances shape those decisions, and how easily we can drift into lives we did not consciously choose.
Authoring the future does not mean controlling what happens next. We cannot do that.
We live within history, relationships, consequences, real constraints, and considerable uncertainty. But within those conditions, we can still participate. We can examine the direction we are moving, recognize the pressures acting upon us, and make the next responsible correction.
The Helix Model is the developing philosophical framework I use to explore that process. Like a gyroscope, it maintains orientation not by remaining still, but through movement, adjustment, and continual recalibration.
The Authoring the Future wing contains writings, field notes, examples, and developing ideas about agency, justice, care, structure, process, rhetoric, power, leverage, drift, and uncertainty.
Some of the ideas are finished.
Many are still wandering toward the edges of the map.
And, as the old warning says:
Here there be dragons.