Dear future-ready friend,

Last weekend I was at Esalen, on the cliffs above the Pacific, not as a speaker, not as a facilitator. Just as a participant, just curious.

One exercise stopped me.

We were asked to write a list. Ten, twenty, thirty things we genuinely want right now. No filter, no editing for reasonableness. A better relationship. Deeper connection. Feeling truly loved. But also: a car, a bicycle, a necklace. Anything.

One woman in the circle shared her list out loud. Relationship. More time with her kids. Feeling truly free. And then, with a small smile: oh, and a Cartier bracelet.

The room laughed. She laughed.

But then she sat with the question: when you have this bracelet, how does it make you feel?

She got quiet. Then: seen. Like someone noticed.

And I found myself wondering: how often do we do this?

We tell ourselves we want the promotion, the relationship, the house, the degree, the successful company, the bestselling book. But if we're honest, those things are often carrying a much deeper request. Somewhere inside the achievement, we imagine, lives a feeling we have been longing for all along.

Which opens a different question than the one we usually ask ourselves about the future.

Psychologists have long observed this. Abraham Maslow mapped the architecture of human needs in the 1940s - belonging, significance, safety, love - and decades of research since have only confirmed it: we reach for the thing because the feeling is harder to name.

Buddhism noticed it centuries earlier. The Pali word tanha (often translated as craving) literally means thirst. Not hunger, thirst. The teaching isn't to stop desiring. It's to see clearly what you're actually thirsty for. Because when you know that, you can drink from many springs.

Both arrive at the same insight: most desires have two layers. The thing. And the feeling beneath the thing.

And if we cannot name the feeling, we often end up taking the longest possible route toward it.

Watching my children has convinced me that we begin life understanding this instinctively.

When they ask for something, the request often sounds material on the surface. A toy. A special outing. Staying up a little later. Yet what they remember years later is almost never the thing itself.

They remember how they felt.

They remember being chosen. Being listened to. Being important enough for someone to put everything else aside for a moment.

Children haven't yet learned to disguise their feelings as objects. Somewhere along the way, many of us become less fluent in the language of feelings and more fluent in the language of achievements.

We stop saying I want to feel appreciated and start saying I want a bigger role. We stop saying I want to feel free and start saying I want more money.

The feeling doesn't disappear. It simply puts on a different costume.

The research and the child are saying the same thing: one in data, one in pure instinct.

Starting with this edition, I want to try something new in the NEXTletter. A +1: one thing I'm learning that surprised me, and that I think could be useful in your future too.