Where to begin?
Hello
I'm Jeremy. I'm a GP, a family doctor. I look after about 32,000 patients, which means I spend most of my working life doing what GPs do: listening to people describe what hurts, what frightens them, what keeps them awake—trying to help and sometimes succeeding.
I'm also writing a book. It's called FOME: Fear of Missing Everything, and it's about the fact that we are, right now, stumbling into a world of material abundance: energy, food, healthcare, computation, without having done any of the thinking about what that world should look like, who it should serve whether it will serve anyone at all, or make a small number of people incomprehensibly rich while the rest of us watch, increasingly powerless.
I've been trying to write this book for about twenty years. I mention that not because it's impressive, it isn’t, but because it tells you something about the kind of person I am. I'm not a futurist. I'm not an economist. I'm someone who sits in a consulting room and watches the consequences of systems that weren't designed with people in mind, and who has spent decades trying to articulate why that matters and what we might do about it.
Sometimes it will be about AI, what it can do, what it can't, what it shouldn't, and the gap between the breathless press releases and the reality I see in clinical practice. Some days it will be about economics: UBI, post-work, the bizarre persistence of artificial scarcity in a world that could feed everyone twice over. Some days it will be about the book itself: how it's progressing, what I'm struggling with, what I've cut that I loved, and why.
Some days it will just be me reading the news and thinking aloud about what it means for the question that drives everything I write: are we going to design the abundant world, or are we going to let it happen to us?
I want to be up front about something. I don't have the answers. I have a consulting room full of people whose lives have been shaped by policy decisions made without them, and I have a growing conviction that the next decade will determine whether technology liberates us or finishes the job of hollowing out everything that makes life bearable. But conviction isn't certainty. I'm working this out as I go. I suspect you are too.
That's the point. I don't want this to be a broadcast. I want it to be a conversation.
If you think I'm wrong, please tell me. If you think I'm missing something, show me. If you're a nurse, a teacher, a warehouse worker, or a retired engineer, and you can see something from where you're standing that I can't see from where I'm standing, I need to hear it. The world needs to hear it. The book is called Fear of Missing Everything because that fear is real. We all have finite lives with which to enjoy the fruits of the coming revolution. We do, however, need to survive long enough to see it. Part of the book is about bringing the future forward, and part is about doing so safely, without the machines taking over. The world is moving too fast for any single person to hold it all in view. The only way to see the whole picture is to look at it together. to find solutions together and, as a species, decide what we want to do. The fear is that it doesn't happen well or it doesn't happen while we are alive, and as such, we miss everything; literally. FOME.
So, here we are—day one.
I'm just a dad with three small children who wants the world they inherit to be kinder than the one I practise medicine in. That's not a manifesto. It is, however, a hope, and hope is always the right place to start.
Let's talk.
