Vitamin We #22: Uncover 2024 Trends with an Eagle Eye View

(2304 words)

Hello everybody!

- Ponny, Editor @ We Stories

Global Trends To Watch in 2024
(according to these specialists)

Are you curious about how this year will unfold and how you can tap into the flow and surf the waves🏄?

Every new year, I enjoy researching what experts in different fields have to say about their predictions and forecasts for the year ahead.

Below is my curated list of findings that serves as my eager-eye-view pulse check via various sectors🦅:

First - Important Dates for World Events (Planned)

2024 will definitely be a pivotal year for humanity! Why?

1. 65+ countries are voting this year, with more than half of the worldwide population experiencing an election in 2024😲 e.g.

• March: Russian & Ukrainian Presidential Elections

• 6-9 June: European Parliament Election

• 5 November: US Presidential Election

This fact alone, overlaying with our AI era, sets the context and temperature for the coming months! If you do have the privilege to vote, please treasure the power in your hands!🗳️

2. The Paris Summer Olympics will be held from 26 July to 11 August 2024.

Market Insight Consultancies:

What do human hearts crave for MORE?

• Pantone: The color of the year is Peach Fuzz - “a hue that echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection… a shade that resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.”

• WGSN: This very informative white paper, Future Consumers 2024 (highly recommended!), summarizes the keywords for consumer sentiments as future shock, overstimulated, tragic optimism, and awe. These sentiments will create 4 consumer profiles: the regulators, the connectors, the memories makers, and the real sensorialists. Which profile do you identify with the most?

• Soon Future Studies’s future forecast 2024: We live in a liquid society where the concepts of identity and individuality are becoming more and more elastic. There will be a retail revival, revenge traveling, and the discerning Gen Z challenging the current economic system for its harmful environmental impact that puts growth imperative under a critical review. The bigger, the more is not always better 🤷

• Accenture: This thought-provoking Life Trends 2024 highlights that creativity stagnation is becoming a real issue as algorithms and tech often sit between creator and audience, losing the original aim of creativity to inspire emotional response via imagination and human connection. The time for originality to shine is now!

• Trendwatching: The Expectation Economy is giving way to the Exchange Economy, an age where challenging issues are to be solved with a cross-industry approach, making brands working together a must, as mentioned in the 2024 Trend Check.

AI & Tech Insiders:

Where is this train of AI mass adoption & tech advancement heading?

• Vincent Koc’s informative article with Towards Data Science predicted that we could expect AI agents to start communicating with other AI agents, more AI wearables and extended reality (XR) devices, and a rush to control the hardware and platform supply chain. Is your personal computer & devices up to speed and capacity?

• CEO of Siemens introduced the “industrial metaverse” that allows professionals to build prototypes of everything from cars to airplanes and even entire factories in virtual spaces, then test them inside the metaverse.

• IBM’s top 6 predictions: Customization of enterprise AI, Open source AI models, API-driven AI and microservices, AI as a national priority, Multimodal generative AI and AI safety and ethics.

• Peter Diamandis’s top 5 hopes for AI are: AI continuing to advance healthcare, Tesla's full self-driving (FSD) AI, AI enhancing education, ongoing democratization of AI via open-source models, and increasing human-AI collaboration and creativity.

• Is our trust in AI shifting? In this global study of public perception of AI, KPMG discovered that people in emerging economies are more trusting, accepting, and positive about AI than people in other countries, while AI use in healthcare is the most trusted and accepted compared to AI use in human resources as the lowest.

Space Travel & Weather Experts:

What is up and out there? Who are we in relation to the galaxy?

• NASA: There will be astronauts landing on the lunar South Pole by 2024. Commercial companies will play an increasing role in the space industry: launching rockets and satellites, transporting cargo and crew, and building infrastructure in low-Earth orbit.

• SpaceX: The first set of satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities (Starlink to T-Mobile) was launched on 2nd Jan 2024. At a recent all-hands meeting with employees, Elon Musk said, “We’ve done a 19th re-flight; We’re now qualifying Falcon 9 to be able to do 40 flights, and we’re aiming for maybe as many as 150 flights this year."

• The Starlink constellation has grown to almost 6,000 since its first launch in 2019. Imagine 6,000 large sofas flying around the globe, sending wifi to Earth back and forth 🌎

• Solar Storms will be Frequent: The sun will reach the peak of its current activity cycle in 2024, according to experts at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). Earth's magnetic field can be disturbed during solar maximum, and geomagnetic storms can penetrate the magnetosphere, leading to widespread radio and power blackouts, more tech glitches, and remarkable auroras🧚🏻.

Astrologers & Psychics:

What is affecting us in the unseen realms e.g. cycles of time, neutrinos & ETs?

• Does history repeat itself? Pluto entered Aquarius♒ on 22nd Jan 2024 and will stay for most of the year, initiating an acceleration of cultural shift for the next two decades! The last time Pluto was here (1778 - 1798) coincided with the American Revolutionary War & the French Revolution ⚔️. Feminism, tribes, and system change are the keywords highlighted by Astrologer Jessica Adams. Are humans more evolved this time around?

• 2024 is a Green Dragon 🐉 year in Chinese astrology, bringing strength, a profound transformation, and encouragement for us to grow taller, stronger to build personal and professional sovereignty.

• Psychic Judy Hevenly predicts that holographic phones will be on the market in 2024. Getting a taxi to the airport could be replaced by an electric air taxi with wings🪽 like airplanes. Are we seeing flying cars finally?

• Intuitive Channeler Lee Harris shared that we can expect radical identity shifts & relationship dynamics that mirror the global revolutionary energies. External destabilization will drive internal stabilization (nervous system), especially for empaths and energy-sensitive people. Creation in new arenas will be highly supported. In May 2024, we could have new disclosures that totally flip the existing narratives of our galactic origins 👽.

Neuroscience & Social Media Researchers:

Is our attention span really shrinking?

• Many believe the average attention span among adults today is just 8 seconds long❌, which is a myth that has been debunked. Researchers are not convinced that we are losing the ability to focus. Our brains just get used to constant diversions by our tech-driven habits. Switching tasks will negatively impact the speed and quality of work in the short term BUT could create a more efficient and fulfilling work experience for 51% of this surveyed population.

• The power of social connections inside the brain: A new study by physicists and neuroscientists from the University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale describes how connectivity among neurons comes about through general principles of networking and self-organization, just like if one person introduces a friend to a third person, those two people are more likely to become friends 👭 with them than if they met separately.

• In We Are Social’s recent Think Forward 2024 report, this is the year of ‘attention layering.’ The next generation is more Zen, attracted to content that soothes instead of stimulates🧘🏽. Moreover, long-form content as in-depth and entertaining learning will return.

Public Health Experts:

Are we done yet - with the factors that disturb closer human connections?

• At the WEF in Davos mid-Jan, a panel of health industry leaders discussed the importance of preplanning for the outbreak of a hypothetical “Disease X”.

• Recent research found clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the muscle tissue starved for energy in patients suffering from long COVID, which makes physical exercises more challenging. “No pain, no gain” might become an obsolete mindset for fitness when a growing population is facing undiagnosed long COVID conditions. We can expect more related research to be published in the coming months.

Chefs, Nutrition & Agriculture Experts:

Is food just a source of fuel anymore?

• Craving for real and new: People want more authentic food and spices, with a growing urge for sustainable food sources. Sensory experiences like “Dinner in a drink” are going to go big.

• FoodMed on the rise: Functional food and hydration that support people's emotional health and overall well-being will also be on the rise. Explorations in integrative and holistic health practices for nourishment, like Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, which had a long history of using food with healing properties, will continue to be in high demand.

• Food price inflation will continue to ease with an expected increase in supply, according to Gro Intelligence. El Niño will have sweeping impacts on global agriculture, though.

Education & Future of Work Researchers:

How much are we prepared to work & create with AI to make lives better?

• 2024 will definitely be the year of AI making us more productive. A working paper out of Harvard Business School on how LLMs amplify consultants’ performance discovered that consultants randomly assigned access to GPT-4 completed 12.2% more tasks on average and worked 25.1% faster. Quality improved by 40%.

• Will there be enough work in the future? In the next five years, 23% of global jobs will change due to industry transformation. But Mckinsey is optimistic: History would suggest that such fears may be unfounded; over time, labor markets adjust to changes in demand for workers from technological disruptions, although at times with depressed real wages.

• Can our schools teach the curriculum of the future already? AI offers novel opportunities for deeply personalized learning and tutoring like instant translation, neuroeducation, and enveloping learning experiences while creating uncharted risks in cybersecurity and managing the fallout of misinformation etc for today’s learners.

• This visual catalog of 100 jobs in the future, although created in 2019, is still very fun if you need some ideas to brainstorm career possibilities for you and the next generations.

• We can expect more neurotech, i.e., human+ machines integrations, to create more superminds as businesses finally realize the competition on productivity, a benchmark most relevant to a manufacturing economy, is no longer the main priority; we need more intelligent companies and organizations to make smart and wise decisions for the collective at large.

Music, Entertainment & Travel Insiders:

How do we desire to PLAY differently?

• Acoustic music will make a quiet comeback, and real-life or lesser-known samples will take off. Investments in new niche genres are also on the rise.

• Also, expect more live shows and a new era of music festivals that infuse tech in innovative ways to create engaging immersive experiences.

• For video consumption, we can expect an increase in personalized service bundles to keep people using their subscriptions. More streaming services will be out, with more options on how and where to watch, like watching movies in shorter chunks or in-car entertainment.

• The most important gaming trend of 2024-2026 may be cloud gaming.

• Top travel trends in 2024? According to Condé Nast Traveller, Consider sports tourism, eco diving, home swapping, rail travels, and more grandparents-grandchildren traveling together.

Financial Consultancies & Economists:

finally, all the numbers and where the money flows!

• According to Harvard Business Review, the economic outlook remains deeply uncertain in 2024.

• JP Morgon expects real GDP growth to have a soft landing.

• OECD outlook projects global GDP growth of 2.9% in 2023, followed by a mild slowdown to 2.7% in 2024 and a slight improvement to 3.0% in 2025.

• S&P Global predicts that policy rates will be cut in advanced economies from mid-year, with Quantitative Tightening (QT) by the world's major central banks will continue.

This list is definitely not exhaustive - expect many local and bottom-up waves of trends to explode💥 that go unnoticed by these experts in niche fields who work in front of computers!

At the end of the year, we’ll revisit this list and see which predictions did come true 🤓 

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Now, back to you -

What does the future you are painting look like in 2024?

What are your mantras for the year?

What exciting dreams are you celebrating by the end of Dec 2024?

We’d love to hear from you. Hit reply to let us know!!!

See you in 2 weeks!

- Ponny 💚

together with Kelly, Pol & Deva @ We Stories