All we know is that the times they are a-changin’ constantly. So here are some thoughts about history, micro and macro time, productive time, ageing with joy toward the end of time – and why the future is more important than the past…

I write this chapter to find out how various types of time are related to one’s own lifetime. Writing is a splendid way to explore and find out. Actually, I have often used the act of writing as a clarifying process – and not only as something I do as a kind of reporting when all is clear in my head. That is what I call creative – or explorative – writing. It’s also through writing you find out what you know and what you still need to learn.

Of course, that can be seen as rather un-academic, but I am not really concerned with that in these “WorldMoires,” so let’s get going.

•

Macro time – Upgrade the future and downgrade the past

We live in a particular era, and many labels have been assigned to characterise ours, like ‘the nuclear age,’ post-post-etc modernity, post- or pre-war, etc. As we enter 2025, I am not sure which one will be more correct; often, we only know what characterised our times best when we look back at history.

There is an overlooked tendency to use labels only relevant to the Western world, which makes up some 11-12% of humanity—”world” and “our time” in reality meaning the Western world and Western epoch.

I would like to believe that, sooner rather than later, we shall label the time we now live in as, let’s say, post-American, post-Western, the age of multipolarity, of the age of the New World.

In humanity’s macro-historical perspective, a lifetime is virtually nothing, so we should be realistic about how much we can change the big world—and time—in ‘our’ nanoseconds.

Our time slot has a past, a present, and a future dimension. However—and this is always enigmatic to me—humanity’s large majority seems super-engaged in the past and (some of) the present. In contrast, very few keep their focus on the future, the imagined yet-to-be-born reality.

And – even worse, people are mostly interested in their country’s national – indeed quite often nationalistic – history. They go to national museums, are taught first and foremost their country’s history in school and, in the best of cases, bits and pieces of Western history, Europe in particular. And they see everywhere – in monuments, museums, etc. – how war shaped their history. However, worldwide, there are very few peace museums and monuments. Most of it focuses on war and, thereby, legitimises warfare as an unavoidable element of history and peace as a residual category between history-determining wars.

It’s no wonder that people swallow raw all the nonsense about NATO winning over Russia in Ukraine and hardly ever think of why, for years, no single important country or organisation has talked about natural and self-evident methods such as mediation, UN peacekeeping, negotiations, conflict understanding, forgiveness, reconciliation – models of a better European future – and peaceful coexistence even with those – pesky! – Russians.

In my view, the only type of history that is really interesting and meaningful is macro-history, i.e. where the focus is global, cultural and structural elements, and where you focus on ways of thinking, the non-material.

The types of historians in this field are Arnold Toynbee – my favourite – Ibn Khaldun, Oswald Spengler, Ssu-Ma Ch’ien, Karl Marx, Robert Nisbet, Johan Galtung, Pitirim Sorokin, to mention a few.

These scholars think ‘big’ in both time and space. They see the global system, cultures and civilisations and empires coming and going over centuries and not only from a colonial/center perspective. Today, when the West is in decline and other parts of the world are rising, China in particular, we ought to take inspiration from these historians, but the fact is that very few today would ever have heard of them. You may also enjoy David Murrin’s Five Phase Empire analysis (2016) with illustrations and Chandler Nguyen’s blog here (2020).

It is often stated that we cannot change the past, but we can change our interpretations of it. The assumption is that we must learn from history and make better and wiser decisions about the future. I have always doubted that hypothesis. While there is some truth in it, it seems to me – not the least as a peace, conflict and future researcher – that human beings mostly repeat history and its mistakes – rather than learn from them.

For instance, history has shown us what warfare means, but most people still believe in various ways to justify the use of violence. The same goes for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as all the movies, events, books, and photos about them. We know everything about those horrors, but have we managed to get rid of these weapons? No, we have increased their number enormously.

History has shown us that some kind of harmony between humans and Mother Earth is required for sustainable living and continued welfare. Since the 1950s, scholars have produced future studies that predicted that we would be where we are today, close to a total breakdown and irreversible damage to the global environment? It may be said that – yes – we know it but we have not had the political will to make the necessary change. What is knowledge – also about history – worth if we completely ignore the knowledge history supposedly provides when we make decisions?

History has shown us what authoritarian leaders can do and how the masses can be manipulated. But where is the West itself heading these years when it is declining? I’m writing in January 2025, when one European country after the other is moving to the right (if the right/left distinction is at all relevant anymore), including those that call themselves social democratic. And from the extreme left to the extreme right, parliamentarians unite in their admiration of militarism, arming Ukraine, running a Cold War against China, hating Russians – and no one wants to talk about conflict resolution, peace or nuclear abolition anymore. I am writing a few days before Donald Trump, for a second time, becomes the leader of the Western world.

‘Where have all the flowers gone and when will we ever learn?’ – as Pete Seeger asked in 1955.

The fact is that society invests far too much in looking backwards, in exploring the past, and is far too little engaged in figuring out the potential of a possible or imagined future that has never been before. We wallow in books, films, museums, and public debates, and God knows how much more that deals only with the past. And – regrettably – if we look to these same media’s attention to the future, we see only – boring – technology-fixated science fiction – right, note the word science, which means natural, not social, science.

We have woefully little to show when it comes to societal, global and multicultural fiction, i.e. heuristic, exciting, surprise-full scenarios about the future world, our own and that of humanity.

I believe it is fair to say that our entire culture lacks a fundamental curiosity about what the future could look like and how to navigate it. Perhaps the future has looked so good for the Western, powerful world that we stopped thinking about it.

This future ignorance has to do with the classical natural science idea that carried over to social science, namely that we must have some empirical evidence to measure and interpret before we can conclude anything about reality. So ‘reality’ by definition belongs to the past and present, and we cannot say anything about the future because we are not there yet – and it cannot, according to this thinking, be analysed before it too has become the present or the past.

It is true that we cannot empirically measure something that does not exist yet. But that raises other questions: Is there not some embryo-like elements of the future in the present? Should it really be impossible to imagine the future 10, 25 or 50 years ahead employing what we build on today and adding imagination and intuition?

Is valid knowledge always necessarily based on empirical, measurable evidence? The idea that only ‘hard science’ can provide a basis for decision-making is a fundamental Western misconception. What happened to philosophy, visionary thinking, wisdom, scenario-making, and all the other tools individuals build on when they make decisions, including what they feel is right to do when acting into the future? Should we not, as collectivities, do the same?

Oh, how much we are missing by looking backwards when we want to act into the future and move forward.

Together with peace, I consider future research the most undervalued – ignored – of scholarly endeavours. The assumption that if we know history well, we shall also act more smartly when shaping the future is, at best, a pious hope and, at worst, a catastrophic idea.

The future exists already. It is a series of potentials, something waiting to be realised, and we ought to spend much more energy and funds to explore what it might contain than we do today.

You can’t find the right way to drive to your desired destination by looking in your rear mirror 99% of the time.

History is, of course, interesting, but I question its ability to guide humanity into a better future. By studying history, we do not develop new ideas or new tools, we rather extrapolate and promote old ones that may – or may not at all – fit our needs for navigating the future.

I agree that history is crucial for understanding the present. For instance, when you work in a conflict zone, you have to understand what the conflicting parties did and said in the past, how they think of the past, whether they have been traumatised, etc. – but when you have a sense of that, you may better move on because future possible solutions to a conflict do not rest on the past or the present – they rest, instead, on developing (with the conflicting parties) some imagined ideal futures which they would be happier to live in than continuing life in their past or present conflictual situation.

To put it crudely, you cannot solve any conflict without looking into the future, and, thus, conflict resolution and mediation is a science but also an imaginative art.

Humanity is facing enormous challenges. Our very survival is at stake. If we do not focus more on the future than hitherto – and more on that than on the past – I feel, and would predict, our survival chances are diminishing simply because decision-makers, various elites, the media and lots of experts focus too much on the past and the present and pay woefully little imaginative attention to the future – indeed when someone comes up with a suggestion for the future, their gut reaction is: Oh, that sounds good in theory, but it is not realistic!

How do they know what is realistic or possible in the future if all they build on is knowledge about the past? We cannot solve humanity’s problems by knowing only the past because the knowledge in the past and of the past has led us toward the impending catastrophe we’re now in.

So, to re-formulate my argument, the determinism built into the idea that the past can be a necessary and sufficient guide into the future is profoundly problematic, if not fraud. We need much more voluntarism, ideas about the possible future, and discussions of strategies/scenarios to realise the good potentials that lie in the future and are waiting to be realised.

We simply need to think and become much more “wild” and bold to shape models of the desired future world(s), discuss which is most attractive and devise strategies to achieve it. To succeed with that, we must put a lot of historical knowledge in the archives because it is irrelevant and tends to monopolise our brains and hearts away from the future.

•

Micro time – I still have no solutions to existential problems.

We’ve just looked into macro or global time. The time that pertains to one’s own—small—life in the large scheme of things, I call micro or personal time. It is about how I use my time in that micro nanosecond of human history that is allotted to me.

In my adult life, I’ve never felt that I had enough time. That is, of course, enough in relation to what I want to do, what I want to experience, learn, become good at or create. So I want to do too much, or I misjudge time. To get around that, the strategy I have chosen is to work rather many hours a day, seven days a week, organise myself efficiently, prioritise – and say goodbye to a lot of TV watching, entertainment, café meetings with friends (most of my friends anyhow live far away), avoid long and tedious meetings and used whatever modern technology that was available.

The Transnational Foundation of which I am the co-founder and director, had a secretary for only a few years decades ago, so my wife and I have done the practical tasks that must be done – such as, for instance, keeping a library or a mail list up-to-date, arranging travels and handling 50-100 mail a day, some of which must be answered. For decades, I have built and maintained several websites and social media – and before those sorts of things, writing, editing, layouting and printing stuff to be put in envelopes, taken to the post office and sent to thousands.

Much has become easier, but the supposedly time-saving devices we also use tend to be time-stealing because technologies are not tested enough before being launched and because support staff, with few exceptions, are more often than not grossly unqualified and sometimes know even less about a problem than you do.

Stealing people’s money is a crime, but stealing their time is OK. I am far from sure that that is reasonable.

My life has been much more purpose-driven than career-driven. I decided early to do something that could promote world peace using analysis and public education. Fifteen years ago, I decided to also invest quite a lot of energy and time to do art photography. So, I’ve always had a work week of about 75 hours.

This is only possible because I love what I do. I am no Mother Theresa – who, by the way, was not that soft and loving – and if my two main types of work did not give me joy, I would do something else. While I respect people who have created great things out of suffering or sacrificing, I am not one of them.

It was also possible thanks to my good health and because I knew every day that I was working for the most important value on earth when it came to peace. Working for peace is never destructive, meaningless, boring, or repetitive. I’ve played many roles for peace – conflict analyst, mediator, author, influencer, media commentator, professor, public speaker, art photographer, etc.- and each of these roles has taught me a lot.

It’s a never-ending challenge and a never-ending process. Charmingly, we shall never reach a situation where we can say that everything under the blue sky is at peace.

I’d call it productive time spent on productive work, and I have always been more of a producer than a consumer. And where I consume a lot is where I need it for what I later produce – I consume other people’s thoughts on war and peace, their books or YouTube videos; I consume as much art as I can wherever I go, but that inspiration is not just entertainment, it is inspirations transformed into some artworks in the future.

My problem with micro time is that I struggle to cope with the limitation that the day and night has only 24 hours and that one needs to sleep. If you sleep 8 hours of 24, you sleep 33% of your life; I feel that would be a terrible waste (also because I never remember the dreams I hear everyone has, so no joys there). If someone invents a pill that reduces the need for sleep to one hour or less, I’ll volunteer as its first guinea pig.

The second problem is that the Creator’s age limitation is extremely short-sighted. I have enough ideas and projects to go way beyond 100. So Lord, give me more, but only with reasonably good health, please.

Finally, the third problem is that I am twisted and torn between living two very active lives—as a peace and future researcher with all its different roles and then as an art photographer. My academic work is rational, education-based, disciplined and uphill because of our times. My artwork is intuitive, experiment-based (I never took as much as one hour of instruction or education), spontaneous and meets no resistance apart from my self-criticism.

Perhaps you ask why, on my way to 75 years of age, I do not simply drop one of them and relax more, take walks, see some movies, care for my roses, and that sort of thing.

The answer is that I just can’t. I won’t let go of either. They both give me the challenges and joys I need, and they are joyfully complementary. I can go in and out of these two worlds when I need to or like to. That outweighs the frustration of feeling stressed about wanting both.

As I said, I am purpose-driven. I find both my life activities tremendously interesting and rewarding every day. Although I do not see peace flourishing as I had hoped – it depends on one’s time horizon because it will come – and I earn nothing from my art photographics (it’s a permanent loss-making activity), I am sure that the daily challenges in both somehow keep me curious and attentive, and that I would die if I am not active, even busy. I have no interest in deckchairs compared with desk and dinner table chairs.

I am not going to slow down, and my wife and I will – health permitting – never live any kind of pensioner’s life. Real entrepreneurs and people in the arts have projects and don’t do things for money but for existence and the joy of it – ride on the desires that drive their work and new ideas until – boom – it’s over.

I shall be grateful for every day I remain on that path.

•

Productive time

Time is a gift, and so is every day. You come to appreciate it more the older you get. I’m aware that it is a privilege to be able to see one’s life from a perspective like this. There are the destitute, chronically ill, poor and people who struggle with their inner demons all through their lives who cannot see their life’s time like I can see mine. I am grateful, and I try to pay back a bit of such a privileged situation by doing something I believe is good for others, for society and for myself. I like that trinity.

I was 20-21 when I began to study sociology at Copenhagen University, I thought I would focus in my future profession as a sociologist on industrial sociology and motivation psychology: What makes us work and how can we make work enjoyable and meaningful? I financed parts of my studies by working for a Danish consultancy firm in the agricultural sector – LOK, Landbrugets Oplysnings- og Konferencevirksomhed, something like the Agricultural Education and Conference Consultancy – which, despite its name, largely attracted firms and corporations outside the agricultural sector.

One of the things I was charged with was to serve as a ‘fixer’ for visiting professors and management experts – usually from the United States – who LOK had invited to guest lecture, run courses, etc. So, before they arrived, I ploughed through their books and soaked up all the knowledge I could so I could also converse with these high-level experts – people like Frederick Herzberg, Chris Argyris, Warren Bennis, William G. Dyer and only God remembers how many others.

In passing, these people were committed to making industrial work more humane and creative and meaningful. At its Kalmar Factory, Volvo experimented with producing cars in self-governing groups to eliminate the terrible and often inhuman assembly line organisation; the idea, of course, was that capitalism would grow better if workers were happy and produced more. It was also the time when Japan competed with the US in management theory development and practical skills courses.

My fixer role and tasks at LOK, plus on-site studies of industrial social psychology in the Copenhagen area, gave me a lifelong interest in organising work, managing time, and finding where my psychological motivation and work satisfaction could be optimised. For a couple of years thereafter, I also worked with my brother – Carl Arne Oberg – in his consultancy and training firm, Oberg ODC, Organisational Development Corporation. During these years, I learned how to meet and converse with people and interview workers and managers from different walks of life.

One of the management science’s slogan-like approaches or fads – it constantly changed – at the time was “Plan, Do & Control” – another was “Work Smarter, not Harder” – the Americans were always good at salesmanship and easily memorable, smashing headlines.

I adopted both and slightly changed the second to ‘work smarter and harder/longer.’ And I soon discovered that like the Chinese today, infrastructure – big or small – is everything. What is mine like?

With online activity increasing, it’s a matter of using time-saving apps, keeping your computer workspace clean and updated, and constantly deleting and archiving things so I am able to quickly find what I need. It’s about establishing fast routines.

From another perspective, it is about being at it every day. I am not a fan of traditional holidays. Before holidays, one must work to finish everything in time, then you are away and wonder how things go back home, and when you return, things have piled up. It’s been a great booster of my productivity that we can now be active online everywhere we go. Holiday to me means doing other things – not doing nothing or ‘resting’ – and going about your daily routines at a slightly slower tempo. So, I am proud to say that I have been working every day since September 1985 with peace research and TFF. It’s never been closed or inactive.

How to cope with time challenges that way?

It’s easy when you are so lucky that you love what you do and you are your own boss (with some supportive Board members only). The essential thing is this: I get energy from doing something creative – which is why boring routines must be cut to a minimum (increasingly by AI) and from finishing a task. I may well be tired because I have worked hard on a task like finishing a manuscript in time for the deadline, but when I look at it, I feel energized, not exhausted.

That is why I never talk about deadlines but lifelines. And I insist that we do not have a weekend but a week begin – and I also prefer near-life to near-death experiences…

Here are some of my work rules of thumb for possible inspiration:

I do not keep long To-Do lists. Just looking at them makes me feel tired. I never enter tasks that take a maximum of 30 min; I do them immediately and feel the energy created by having them behind me. I make lists only for longer-term tasks so that the important things I want to do in life are always readily available and can be prioritised. I used to keep paper and pencil close; now it’s an app that converts speech to text; I get ideas at the most strange moment, like when I brush my teeth or mow the lawn. Taking everything down promptly makes it easier to transfer ideas to a writing task I’m working on. (It is helpful when you get older and may forget things).

I mix boring and exciting activities and never touch an email more than once. I say ‘No’ when my inner voice whispers that it will only give me stress to say yes. I minimise negative energy and instead send upbeat appreciations to people who do good work rather than criticising those who do bad or stupid things. I’ve learned to not bother about people who attack me ad hominem and only respond when there is a criticism of substance. Negative energy wears me down, puts me in defensive mode and forces me to play the game they play.

I find it wise to set off 5% more time than I think it will take to complete a task. Things Take Time – TTT – as Piet Hein said and invariably, many tasks do take longer than we hope or estimate. But admittedly, it takes time and experience to judge time budgets correctly. I still make mistakes and get annoyed with the negative energy that generates.

And then there is the Plan-Do-Control principle. Everything takes some planning and while we joke about plans being there to see how far we are from them, that is not the way to go. Good planning and a vision is everything. It gives positive energy when you finish a task before its lifeline.

Be aware that the only never-changing constant factor is that everything changes all the time. Nothing is ever finished once and for all. Also, remember that time is not linear, time is circular. It’s OK to repeat yourself and your themes as long as you constantly change and build new elements to solidify that argument, concept, or worldview. I’ve met many young scholars who worked as if their PhD was their last big opus while, in fact, it should be seen as the foundation stone of a long life of academic publishing.

I do not believe in the marginal utility of working until a task is 100 % perfect. Moving the final product from being 98 to 100% perfect is proportionately extremely time-consuming and usually not worth the investment. I find writing 10 98% perfect articles better than spending years writing only one 100% perfect article. Each endeavour is a new learning experience, so spend your time doing different but related things instead of building one intellectual monument, or tombstone. Furthermore, you may fall so much in love with that one 100% perfect product that your mind will close to other qualitative analyses, and that’s sad because every successful intellectual endeavour is also about opening new vistas.

Like there is no final peace, there is no final article, analyses, argument. Or truth.

Finally, smile at fools but take a fight about essentially important subjects when your integrity is also tarnished.

Oh, before I end this philosophising about how to work productively and achieve something, self-discipline is vital. No techniques or working principles will compensate for laziness.

•

End times

Encyclopaedia Britannica defines eschatology as “the doctrine of the last things. It was originally a Western term, referring to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs about the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the messianic era, and the problem of theodicy (the vindication of God’s justice).

I do not participate in the global discussion of possible worldwide nuclear annihilation – or ecological catastrophe – that has spread over the last few years. I do not share the belief that we have come to the end of the world. That sort of assertions are impossible to argue, they are speculative and quite likely expressive of deep personal frustration and anxiety. Worse, they undermine people’s desire to become active and work for a better world – if it is anyhow going to end soon, why should engage in long-term constructive activities? There is nothing people in power like more than citizens giving up and giving in. We should not give them that opportunity or joy!

However, when we focus on the micro or personal time, it can hardly be denied that the older we get, the more we approach the – unknown, unavoidable – deadline. Usually, people do not think much of that when they are 20 or 40; life seems eternal. But later, you discover that it isn’t. Death rears its ugly head in different ways, even if you try your best to ignore it.

This has compelled me – and my dear wife, Christina – to cancel a type of sentence we have often used earlier: Oh, we can always do that later. When we age, there are two fundamentally important things to do: Prioritise hard and put a golden edge on your life if possible. The first doesn’t cost anything, and the latter is possible if, through your younger years, you have saved a bit, lived modestly, and, therefore, arrived at your old age with little or no debt.

Incidentally, I’ve always believed – probably because I have not had a monthly salary since 1989 but have lived as a freelance professor, expert, writer and lecturer here and there – that saving can be a way to a sustainable economy. My grandmother was a hardworking woman who took care of an entire property with several apartments on the main street of Silkeborg, Denmark, after her husband had left her for waltzing through Europe to Egypt and, as far as I know, was never seen again.

She had wisdom, and I spent many summers with her in the 1950s and 1960s and learned a lot. At the end of almost every visit, she gave me 50 Danish kronor – in today’s value, about US$ 80 and said: ‘Don’t spend it, put it into your bank account and let it grow until you need it for your education or an important trip somewhere.’

And then she added – ‘Remember, you’ll never get the big money if you are not careful with the small money.’ There and then, at the age of 5-10, I got her point and have lived by it ever since. It should be Law Number 1 of economics, at least personal and family economics, but that is not what capitalism teaches us.

So, get really important things done while you can. Enjoy the interest income from an economically modest and workwise intensive life – and grandmother’s economic wisdom. Perhaps slow down a bit, live more mindfully and enjoy the small everyday things. Take better care of your health than you may have earlier because it is becoming more fragile.

And be grateful for every day you’re alive and well. Say it aloud and share it with those closest and dearest to you. Be happy for what has been and is – your family, the blue sky, the delicious meal – rather than unhappy about what is no longer: C’est la vie!

It is important to distinguish between physical and mental or psychological age. We all age, cells die, and you may feel a little pain in your knee joints sometimes, and we cannot do much about it. But we do not have to simultaneously grow old mentally. We can stay forever young.

I fail to understand people who say they do not do a certain activity any longer because they have reached a certain age. I fail to understand how otherwise able elderly people sometimes say that they do not know how to make the day pass. It seems they have grown old, become unnecessarily passive and lost curiosity. Perhaps they age faster and die earlier than they otherwise would.

It has many advantages to get older – to age. There are things I no longer grapple with and where I stand. Thanks to lifelong skills development, there are tasks I can do much faster than 20 or 40 years ago. I look through fakes and falsehoods faster than before. I have nothing more to prove to the world, only to myself. I do not have to make a career but can continue to be purpose-driven.

It is meaningful to distinguish between information and knowledge, the latter being a well-structured collection of the former. But even comprehensive knowledge is insufficient for a rich life and a better world. The Buddhists and many others, particularly outside the West, know we need wisdom.

E. F. Schumacher, famous for his pathbreaking book, Small Is Beautiful (1973) started his follow-up to it – A Guide For the Perplexed (1977) – by stating that we are now so knowledgeable that we cannot do without wisdom. How true 50 years ago and even more so today! Wisdom does not come automatically with age but the chance to achieve a bit of wisdom does increase with both physical and mental age.

I’m working on it.

Here, towards the end, I should perhaps say something about how I see death. I am not very concerned about it, except that I would like to keep it at bay and live for as long as possible, healthily and meaningfully. I have no idea whether there is something after one’s physical death, and of course, nobody knows. If you fancy a linear time perception, there is probably nothing after that strong light people who have had near-death experiences tell us they have seen. If you believe in a more cyclical, organic time conception, it makes sense that something new and exciting may happen in some other system, universe, or wherever.

I don’t necessarily think it has to be a new body around a new soul. Perhaps that post-death existence is something more “fluffy,” holographic that ephemerally moves constancy from one phase to another but keeps the ever-changing entity the same. To visualise this admittedly weird thought, I was inspired by the Chinese digitalized, drones-based shapes and forms as seen on New Year’s Eve 2025 – one illustrative one here:

In light of what I said at the beginning of this chapter about the need for us all to focus much more on the future than we do, I recognise that these scattered views about death and the future after it must disappoint my readers. However, I thought it would be helpful to speak mainly about the here-and-now known world, its past, present, and future and use some digitally supported imaginations.

By the way, I wouldn’t mind a little fireworks when I have fallen out of this existence. It’s better to celebrate life than mourning the inevitable.

But wherever we go afterwards – if anywhere – I promise to explore it as a good sociologist and peace researcher – even upload photos to its cloud – and honour my commitment to focus on the future in that unknown – unknowable – swirling, ever-changing future time and space.

•