I Spent Twenty Years in the Future

Last Sunday I was at a community conference on agentic AI in Hamburg. The talks were good, but that’s not what stuck with me. It was the mood. The room was buzzing — that specific energy you get when a group of people is genuinely excited about what they’re doing and building - and looking very positively into the future.

The conference was held in English, as these things tend to be. International visitors, international speakers. Nobody thought twice about it.

Then I walked out, checked my phone, and the world outside that room felt like a completely different reality. What’s playing out on a geopolitical level is the fuel for nightmares and tragedy at a larger and larger scale.

The difference between those two perceptions caused me to be a bit nostalgic. And since writing things down is a good way to channel emotions, here we go.

The language that connected us

For the last fourteen years, English has been the language I use day-to-day. Not because I moved to an English-speaking country — because I worked with international teams where English was the bridge.

The nationalities kept adding up. Colleagues from the US, Ukraine, Russia, South America, Africa, the Middle East, Romania, Bulgaria. I even managed someone in China. At some point the list stopped being worth mentioning, because it was just how work looked for me. You joined a team, there were people from everywhere, you got on with it. English made it unremarkable.

And what a blast it was. Getting to know all of these people, working with them, building things together. Some of them became friends — the kind that stick around long after you’ve left a company and moved on. A lot of my closer friendships today are international, scattered across countries and time zones, because that’s the world I’ve spent my career in.

The people I actually know

Here’s what strikes me. I’ve recently worked in a company where colleagues of Ukrainian and Russian origin got along perfectly well. Not despite the political tensions between their countries — it just didn’t come up that way. They were colleagues. They were good at their jobs. That was the relevant fact. And they showed each other that they genuinely cared for each other.

Same thing with Americans. The time I spent working working remotely for an US company, I got to know a lot of great people. I wouldn’t want to miss that experience. Yet when I see what their country is doing right now, it couldn’t be further from how I’d like the world to be. The Americans I know — the ones I worked with, ate lunch with, solved problems with — bear no resemblance to what their government currently projects.

I’ve had interactions with colleagues from the Middle East too. Every single one: respectful, on an eye-to-eye level. I’ve personally never been in a discussion about whose religion is more appropriate or whose way of living is better. It just wasn’t part of the equation.

There’s a distance between the people I actually know and the headlines about their countries. And the distance is enormous.

What worked, at least in my experience

Looking back, I think what made all of this work was surprisingly simple. Nobody had to give up who they were. Nobody had to pretend to be someone else. The deal was: show up open, do good work, be respectful, meet people halfway. Integration, not assimilation. There’s a difference, and it matters.

I realise this sounds a bit like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek — the bridge of the Enterprise, where it didn’t matter where you came from as long as you were competent and brought the right attitude. And honestly? That’s not a bad description of the best teams I’ve worked on. Origin mattered less than what you contributed. Different perspectives in one room didn’t create friction — they created something better than any of us could have produced alone.

That wasn’t a philosophy I adopted from a book. It’s just what happened when the conditions were right.

The bubble I live in

Now, I’m not naive about this. I know I live in a bubble. I work with highly educated people. I always have. The international, English-speaking, mobile professional class — that’s my world. And it’s a self-reinforcing loop: education leads to better jobs, better jobs lead to international exposure, international exposure loosens your attachment to national identity, and the whole thing feeds back on itself.

The same globalisation that opened my world narrowed it for others. I see that. People whose jobs moved to other countries, whose economic security eroded while mine grew. I think that’s a decent part of what fuels the enthusiasm for Trump in the US, for the AfD in Germany. People lost things during these decades of change. Real things. I’m not going to dismiss that.

What I notice, though, is that the rightward push happening in Germany doesn’t pull me. And I think it’s precisely because of that loop. My sense of belonging was shaped more by those international teams than by national identity. When I see the push towards “this country belongs to us,” I feel oddly disconnected — not because the sentiment is illegitimate, but because it doesn’t map to my experience. Through all of those years working across borders, Germany as a state kinda stopped being the primary thing I identify with.

I’m not sure what to make of that. But I’m not going to pretend it’s not there.

What’s left

I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything here. This is just what’s going on in my head at the moment.

I spent twenty years in what was supposed to be the future. The international, collaborative, borders-don’t-really-matter version of the world. And in my experience, it worked. Not as a utopia, not without its blind spots and costs — but as a way of working with people, it genuinely worked. People are people. They’re not their countries.

I’m not sure that future is still coming for everyone. The structures that made it easy — open borders, shared optimism, the assumption that connection was better than isolation — those feel less certain than they did even five years ago. The people haven’t changed. My Ukrainian friends are still my friends. My American friends are still my friends. The few Russian friends I got to know better are still my friends. But the scaffolding around those relationships is shifting in ways that make me uneasy.

Maybe this is just a person in his forties being nostalgic about the past. Maybe the window I worked inside was always smaller than it felt from the inside. I don’t know. But it happened, and it was good, and that feels worth writing down.