Future Day
Every year in the three days leading up to the year’s end, we practice a holiday in which our kids are visited by “the Future Police,” have a vice-facilitating possession stolen from them, and are encouraged to write a contract detailing how they will make the world a better place—which will ensure the restoration of their stolen property (plus a small gift) and the opportunity to earn a bigger gift if and when they achieve a goal stated in the contract. By folding this holiday into the wider seasonal zeitgeist around self-improvement, goal setting, and new commitments, we are able to easily leverage existing trends and tendencies in a way that reinforces important elements of our House’s worldview.
Day One: The Theft
During the first night of the holiday, the Future Police take one item from each child and replace it with a calling card.
The Calling Card: The card resembles a small business card with cartoon mouse in a Skinner box on one side and a cryptic message or cipher on the other (more on this later).
The Item Taken: The item taken is a possession (or means of access to a resource) with Skinner-box-style addictive tendencies to which the child has become addicted (common examples include phones, game consoles, social media accounts, etc.). If one of our kids decides to hide a device they’re addicted to, they will not get one of these cards and will both feel left out and miss an opportunity to receive gifts.
A Note on Skinner boxes: A Skinner box, also known as an operant box or behavior box, is an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal subject can manipulate in order to obtain reinforcement (picture a mouse in a cage that can push a lever to get food). If food appears every time the animal subject manipulates the apparatus, it will only engage with it when hungry. If the food appears only sometimes, the subject will engage the apparatus constantly—regardless of hunger or need for food—as though it were “addicted.” This effect is what causes addiction to things like approval on social media or ultra-simplistic gameplay loops in some video games (like loot boxes).
We chose to build the holiday around Skinner boxes instead of the concept of generic vice for three reasons:
- Super effective Skinner boxes are something of a new challenge for our species. We need our kids to be able to engage with the online world to be successful while also understanding how a person can waste their lives pressing a lever for points.
- It avoids vague definitions of sin, which would allow parents to impose arbitrary or fleeting generational values on their kids as opposed to intergenerational family values.
- It conveys our intergenerational value that one of the highest orders of immorality involves engaging in non-efficacious action.
Day Two: Future Day
The kids create a contract to demonstrate to the Future Police their plan to create a better future. This contract details both a vision for the future and one concrete thing they can attempt to achieve over the course of the year, which will help that future come to pass. Once contracts are completed, parents help their kids decipher the cryptic message, cypher, or riddle on the card, which names a designated drop point for the contract (a place where the Future Police will pick it up in thousands of years).
As a group, the family then stows the contract away in the designated drop point, after which they enjoy a traditional “Future Day” meal, with futuristic-themed foods. Over this dinner, the family discusses their visions of where our species is going and the roles they intend to play in shaping the future of humanity.
The Cypher: This is up to parents’ discretion and can be anything. Parents don’t even need to complete this step if they find it too difficult (the back of the Future Police’s calling card could simply state something like: “Fold your contract behind the board in the far northwest corner in your attic”).
The Hiding Spot: The idea here is to create a fun, whole-family activity that involves stowing the contract in a location that might actually stay in place for hundreds of years. Good hiding spots range from buried lockboxes in a backyard to envelopes stuffed under floorboards. A family might even maintain a designated time capsule or vault for the purpose (like a fireproof safe passed between generations).
The Vision for the Future: This is mostly an exercise in encouraging kids to engage in long-term thinking. Families may choose to collect and pass down, from generation to generation, their children’s predictions, ideas, and hopes for the future. Sharing ancestors’ archival predictions can become part of the Future Day meal conversation.
The Pledge: It is up to each kid to decide what pledge they’ll make. Pledges may range from starting a local composting group to getting a certain GPA or founding a non-profit.
Day Three: The Reward
Having successfully delivered their pledges to the Future Police, addictive devices are returned to participating kids, along with a modest present and another card for them to hide in the same spot should they successfully achieve their larger goal for the year.
Upon Completion of the Future Police Pledge
Once a child believes they have accomplished that which they promised to the Future Police, they will hide their second Future Police calling card in the family’s designated drop location. They will then receive a larger present, proportional in difficulty to the task they set for themselves.
Holiday Aesthetics
- Should a family’s children veer in the direction of high achievement, the Future Police will appear as increasingly kind forces over the course of the holiday as the future they are from transforms from a dystopia to utopia based on the kids’ actions.
- Decorations around the holiday are based around sparkly stars—easy to find around New Year’s—combined with more galactic imagery (like glow-in-the-dark star stickers) and clocks.
- The holiday “mascot” is the Skinner box mouse. A cute cartoon mouse depicted either in a Skinner box, a space suit, or piloting various futuristic devices (robots and the like).
Holiday Foods
- Future Day food is themed to look aesthetically futuristic. A more dedicated family may do something like make a dish that looks like pills while a less ambitious family will lean into things like freeze-dried food (astronaut ice cream and Dippin’ Dots).
- One staple of Future Day foods are dishes with “sparkly” space themes, such as flavor crystals (unflavored pop rocks, which add a spark to both sweet and savory foods).
- You can make Future Day drinks by adding food coloring to cocktails and serving them in beakers or out of punch bowls lined with dry ice.
- For more inspiration, search for images of molecular gastronomy dishes or meals served at Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge.
Objectives Behind the Holiday’s Design
- By prompting kids to describe their visions for the future, this holiday is designed to get children engaged with long termism and big-picture thinking at an early age, while also encouraging them to consider their role in the distant future.
- This holiday furthermore contextualizes the future of human civilization as something they have personal agency over and personal responsibility for.
- Future Day encourages children to set concrete plans and rewards them for executing those plans. It is meant to plant the idea in their heads that they can, even as kids, undertake big things that have a civilization-level impact even if they start small.
- Hiding contracts makes logical sense given the holiday’s framing (if you were going to communicate with someone in the future, a reasonable way to do it would entail hiding it at a pre-agreed-upon location). The act of going out and performing a physical action adds a level of ritual action to the holiday without adding cringe (as the ritual has a function).
- By temporarily removing addictive privileges specifically related to operant conditioning (addiction produced through periodic, unpredictable rewards) and illustrating the simplicity of that addiction by showcasing Skinner boxes, this holiday helps kids begin to contextualize addictive habits in a more logical and calculating way early in life. We live in a society in which you can’t block kids’ access to addictive devices and channels without setting them up for later ruin (when they reach independence and binge on these addictive things, having developed zero coping mechanisms) and disempowering them by removing their access to technology (a non-starter for a family that wishes to raise efficacious children that engage with broader society and the mainstream economy).
This holiday is not meant to be a “dishonest” holiday like Christmas. With Christmas, Santa Clause objectively doesn’t exist, whereas with Future Day, there is a plausible basis for the real existence of a Future Police, which can be discussed with kids as they mature: Who is to say that a million—or even 10 million—years from now, our descendants have not invented some mechanism for subtly influencing the past? Is it impossible that parents celebrating this holiday are being subtly influenced by some technology beyond our understanding without conscious recognition of this manipulation?