“I’ll never be a billionaire. Now I help other people try to get there, but I just don’t have the emotional well.” These words from a tech company founder-turned-startup-coach would once have surprised me, prompting frantic scribbling in my field journal. One year into an anthropological study of futurists, strategists, designers, and foresight practitioners in Silicon Valley, however, I only nodded and noted the timestamp on my recorder. These once unexpected expressions of emotional and psychological depletion had turned out to be commonplace, imposing themselves to the point of dominating many of our research interviews. (read more...)