If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Did you know that the “profit-at-all-costs” mindset that dominates our world today is a relatively recent invention—and one that might be holding us back from true progress?
- Have you ever wondered what society would look like if we valued community, purpose, and sustainability just as much as we value financial growth?
- What if you could use a simple mental framework to make decisions that don't just benefit your wallet today, but also protect your future and the world around you?
Listen to This Could Be Our Future — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from This Could Be Our Future
- Understand how invisible ideas govern our lives, and discover how Kickstarter’s success proved that we can build systems prioritizing creativity over pure profit.
- Learn how the concept of 'financial maximization' became the ultimate metric of success in the 1970s, and why it is actually an invented concept rather than an unchangeable law of nature.
- Discover how Cold War game theory corrupted Adam Smith’s original vision of capitalism, transforming a cooperative free market into a hyper-rational climate of greed and distrust.
- Find out why extreme profit-driven logic is destroying cultural diversity, causing everything from pop radio stations to blockbuster movie franchises to become endlessly repetitive.
- Explore how we can move beyond the idea that money-making is the only measure of worth, allowing us to unlock the true value of community, knowledge, and friendship.
This Could Be Our Future — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Our lives are led by unseen ideas, and financial maximization is the largest among them all.
Chapter 3: Believing financial maximization is the only rational choice has produced a pervasive climate of greed and widespread distrust.
Chapter 4: Financial maximization has rendered everything identical today.
Chapter 5: Financial maximization makes the rich richer, and everyone else bears the consequences too.
Chapter 6: Money isn’t a very reliable gauge of human happiness and fulfillment.
Chapter 7: Bentoism helps us take rational decisions that aren’t driven by money alone today.
Chapter 8: When we follow values beyond money’s pull, we finally begin to see the wider picture more clearly.
Chapter 9: Altering our value spectrum will require some time.
This Could Be Our Future Summary & Overview
This Could Be Our Future (2019) is a manifesto for a better tomorrow – a future world that isn’t ruled solely by money, but by all forms of value that humanity produces. Former Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler explains how our modern obsession with “financial maximization” has led society astray – bankrupting institutions, stifling innovation, and starving creativity – and what we can do to adjust our course.
Who Should Listen to This Could Be Our Future?
- Critical capitalists and suspicious socialists
- Entrepreneurs and business owners ready to make a difference
- Anyone who suspects that there is more to life than money
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