For many of us, the first inkling we had that our own vague feelings of discontent were actually shared by quite a lot of people came with last year’s Occupy movement. Fuelled by the global banking crisis and the outrage at the social and economic injustice that had engendered it, the protestors camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and in more than 90 other cities around the world, were the first indication of a widespread sense that things couldn’t continue as they were.

And, coming so soon after the August riots in London and other major cities in the UK, the Occupy movement added to the prevailing sense that the economic, social and moral freefall had to be checked. But exactly what is the alternative to the social and economic system we currently have, and just how are we supposed to go about changing it?

It is this feeling that writer and natural philosopher Mark Ballabon, from Potters Bar, has tapped in to with his latest book, Courting the Future: Preparing for a different world .

“People have great hopes for the future but they have great difficulty expressing that future, which they see in freefall and collapse,” Mark says. “This appetite that began in the 1700s with the Industrial Revolution and this incessant drive to grow, grow, grow the economy has been beyond the point of sustaining itself for almost a decade now.

“People want to value themselves in terms of their own growth as people, their communities and values – these things keep coming up but there’s no forum to be able to talk about it. This book will give people the chance to express their desires freely.”

The book is a series of 26 articles which Mark hopes will provide readers with a new mindset for thinking about the future. It moves through such sections as ‘Why worry?’, ‘When nothing satisfies’, ‘Transforming conflict’ and ‘Humility’ and posits that a vision of the future based on the present or the past, or one based solely on remedying something that’s currently out of balance, is a limited one.

“Running through the book is people’s inherent search for a meaning to their life,” says Mark. “Often the happiest people are those who find purpose from living within their skills or within their community.”

Mark’s book offers practical guidance on how to court the future – if we do this with as much passion and mindfulness as we do when courting a loved one, he believes, then we will become the agents of change for the future.

“Everything that you read about ‘the future’ is about the extension of technology – the iPad 33 and the insertion of microchips in the brain,” Mark laughs, “but I don’t believe that. The future is going to be a development and release of the human technology. This almost obsessive dependence on outside technology has got a limited timespan – it’s so unsustainable, it’ll end up being a footnote of history. I’m not against technology per se, I’m just saying that it’s gone too far.

“People will be able to start to engage with creating a future that’s got nothing to do with the radical decline we see in society today,” says Mark, “but about the hope and motivation and values that most of us actually share. The human mindset is the whole essence of courting the future.”

  • Courting the Future: Preparing for a different world by Mark Ballabon is available at Waterstones, The Spires Shopping Centre, High Street, Barnet or from Eminent Productions Limited. The book launch is at The Centre, Bath Place, High Street, Barnet on Sunday, August 12 at 1pm. Details: www.epl-uk.com, www.waterstones.com