Let me introduce myself: Benjamin Melki, entrepreneur and founder of Future Is Great.
I have a flaw... I struggle to enjoy the present when a painful obligation is waiting for me. It is an old inclination. For example, when I was a student at school and a tedious math assignment due the next day was waiting for me at home, I could not bring myself to play and enjoy moments of relaxation until I had relieved myself of that schoolwork. Oh, I would do the bare minimum so I could get back to my leisure as quickly as possible, but at least I could go and entertain myself with my mind cleared.
It is this heightened tendency to want to rid myself of burdens that pushed me to create the Future Is Great movement: how can we fully enjoy life today if we know that everything dear to us, including our own existence, will be torn away by an inescapable death? The more one appreciates life, the more an ephemeral incarnation appears absurd, despite the understandable persistence of some in convincing themselves otherwise. Vast subject; I am certainly not the first to wonder about it, but our time offers new perspectives.
The idea of disappearance does not prevent me from living and appreciating the pleasures of existence, but still, would it not be infinitely preferable not to be subjected to biological degradation, to be able to choose to live as long as desired, in perfect health, surrounded by those dear to us?
To live as long as desired, in perfect health, surrounded by those dear to us. Now there is an ambition, a direction, a goal! So wonderful that it deserves everything we can do to reach it. After all, what matters more than our loves, our families, and our friends? To get there, we must defeat certain scourges that block the road: aging, disease, environmental problems, and poverty. By studying the work of futurist authors, I discovered a new world. A very real world, where people dream and work to free us from the four aforementioned constraints through radical technological advances.
And from it I built a conviction: I believe the chances are high that, in a more or less near future, humanity will manage to technologically abolish the causes of aging, disease, environmental problems, and poverty. This is the conviction I carry loud and clear with Future Is Great!
I cannot and do not want to promise anything, but it seems unrealistic to me that in 50, 100, 200 years or more, we will not have managed to free ourselves from cancer, aging, fossil fuels, and other such horrors. Let us rejoice today in our future! Let us have "nostalgia for tomorrow".
Changing the perception of the future, changing the cultural paradigm
The vast majority of people cultivate a pessimistic vision of a dark future, where technologies will create more problems than they solve. Perhaps this is your case, you who are reading these lines. It is this cultural perception, through Future Is Great, that I want to change. I want to offer people an alternative vision, a radically optimistic and solution-oriented vision. To let them glimpse the possibility of a future where we will have solved most of our problems and where we will have the choice to live as long as desired, in perfect health, surrounded by those we love... the main objective.
What I discovered in the optimistic technophile vision of the future, and in the direction we must actively pursue to reach it, is a true metaphysics, a meaning to life. This position involves absolutely novel, refreshing, and exhilarating intellectual paths, worthy of wider diffusion.
The genesis of Future Is Great
Early 2000s — Reading Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution by Eric Drexler. Major intellectual shock. A complete paradigm shift in my vision of life and the future. Realization of the capacity of radical technological advances to transfigure the human condition. At that time, nanotechnology appeared to be the revolution destined to transform the world. It would ultimately be artificial intelligence.
2004 — Launch of the website nanovip.com, The Nanotechnology Business Directory, designed to list nanotechnology companies around the world. The site would later be sold.
2005 — Reading The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. This reading consolidated and definitively structured my technoptimist vision.
2010 — Wanting to give form to this vision without yet knowing exactly how to embody it, I purchased the domain names technoptimism.com and technoptimism.org. Launch of the first technoptimist website and publication of the first technoptimist manifesto.
2018 — The concept of "technoptimism" now seemed too cold, abstract, and impersonal to me. I therefore decided to make a fundamental change of direction and create a new identity: Future Is Great. Launch of the first website under this new vision.
2026 — The world is now ready for an assertive technoptimist vision. Founding of futureisgreat.lifestyle.
The project enters a new phase: no longer only defending technological progress rationally, but making the future emotionally desirable through art, aesthetics, and culture.