This Could Be Our Future

What if the richest measure of a successful life—or a successful society—was not how much money we made, but how much value we created for one another? In This Could Be Our Future, Yancey Strickler, the cofounder of Kickstarter, proposes nothing less than a moral revolution against what he calls the hidden default of our age: financial maximization. His central claim is both simple and transformative: the world’s most urgent problems—from inequality and burnout to the loss of community and creativity—stem from our decision to treat money as the only rational goal worth pursuing.

Strickler argues that this obsession with profit is not a law of nature. It’s an idea—one born in boardrooms and business schools in the last half century—that has quietly metastasized to dominate nearly every sphere of life. We’ve been trained to think that the rational choice in any situation is the one that makes the most money. But this belief, he says, has trapped us in what he calls the financial maximization mindset—a worldview too narrow to handle today’s challenges or to inspire a hopeful future.

From Kickstarter to a Global Vision

Strickler’s insight began during his years leading Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform he co-founded to help creators bring their ideas to life. Unlike typical Silicon Valley startups seeking a billion-dollar exit, Kickstarter refused to sell or go public. In 2015, it became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)—legally committing itself to social and cultural goals alongside profit. This choice reflected Strickler’s growing belief that there are forms of value that can’t be counted in dollars. Kickstarter’s success demonstrated that ideas rooted in generosity and community could thrive—even in a marketplace shaped by greed.

Yet Strickler’s question went further: if a single company could resist the pull of financial maximization, could whole societies do the same? His answer takes shape in what he calls Bentoism—a new way to visualize our self-interest as something larger than individual gain, encompassing the needs of future generations, our communities, and our own moral growth.

The Trap of the Hidden Default

In the opening chapters, Strickler exposes the modern economy’s default settings—those invisible rules we mistake for common sense. He points to behavioral economics, game theory, and policy changes from the 1970s onward that trained us to equate rationality with selfishness. Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” became distorted by thinkers like Milton Friedman, who proclaimed that “the social responsibility of business is profit.” Once that ideology took hold, financial maximization seeped into government, education, healthcare, and even our personal ambitions. It became the water we swim in without noticing.

The result? A world of sameness and stagnation. Strickler chronicles how radio stations, movie studios, and neighborhood stores were swallowed by giant chains pursuing profit above all else. He calls this the “Mullet Economy”: business in front (cost-cutting, layoffs, efficiency), party in back (executives and shareholders reaping giant rewards). While productivity has soared, wages have flatlined since the 1970s, and community institutions—from local bookstores to small-town main streets—have withered.

A New Definition of Progress

To replace financial maximization, Strickler invites us to expand our idea of value itself. True progress, he insists, can’t be measured only by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—a metric that counts spending but ignores meaning. (As Simon Kuznets, the economist who invented GDP, warned in 1934, “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”) Strickler draws on economists Mariana Mazzucato and Elizabeth Anderson, and philosophers like Michael Walzer, to argue for a pluralistic theory of value. Each domain of life should be guided by its own values: fairness and justice in politics, sustainability in business, care in health, creativity in art—not by the blunt calculus of profit.

This expansion of value aligns with human psychology. Strickler weaves in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Daniel Pink’s research on intrinsic motivation to show that money motivates us only until basic security is met. Beyond that, people thrive through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Our current system, by prioritizing wealth over these deeper needs, traps us in what he calls “the second rung” of human potential: safe but unfulfilled.

Bentoism: Seeing the Bigger Picture

To help us act beyond narrow self-interest, Strickler introduces Bentoism—a conceptual tool inspired by the Japanese lunch box. It divides our choices into four quadrants: Now Me (our immediate desires), Future Me (our long-term growth), Now Us (the people and communities we affect), and Future Us (the generations after us). Each quadrant represents a valid form of self-interest. In practice, Bentoism helps you check your decisions against a broader field of values—security, purpose, fairness, sustainability—to find what Strickler calls “rational self-coherence.”

Bentoism’s significance goes beyond personal growth. Strickler envisions entire organizations and societies guided by the same multi-dimensional awareness. Companies like Patagonia or Tesla, he notes, already use their resources to create long-term value rather than just short-term profit. Musicians like Adele and Taylor Swift exemplify it through fairness and community-minded decisions. If these ideas spread, Strickler believes a new class of leaders—the Values Maximizing Class—could emerge, devoted to inventing systems that grow nonfinancial forms of prosperity.

Why It Matters Now

Strickler’s manifesto combines philosophical depth with democratic optimism. He reminds us that capitalism itself was once a radical idea born of imagination, and that hidden defaults can always be reprogrammed. Change, however, is slow: social transformation takes roughly thirty years—a generation. But the author wants readers to see this not as discouraging but empowering. The next thirty years, he insists, are our window to build a world driven not by accumulation but by meaning.

Strickler’s diagnosis begins with what he calls a hidden default—an operating assumption so deeply embedded in modern life that we confuse it for natural law. The default says: in any decision, the rational choice is the one that makes the most money. What started as an economic principle has quietly shaped how we design cities, schools, and even our self-worth.

Drawing on behavioral economics, Strickler explains that people tend to go along with whatever “default setting” is offered. Organ donation rates, for example, depend not on cultural values but on how the form is worded; if donation is the default option, most people remain donors. In the same way, we’ve defaulted into a world optimized for profit without consciously choosing it.

How It Became Normal

The author traces this ideology from Adam Smith’s benign vision of self-interest (“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our dinner…”) to its mutation in 20th-century America. During the Cold War, the RAND Corporation used game theory to model conflict, introducing the idea that rationality meant maximizing one’s individual gain—even at others’ expense. Milton Friedman completed the cultural shift in 1970 with his New York Times essay declaring profit the only social responsibility of business. By the 1980s, business schools, consultants (notably McKinsey), and politicians enshrined this view into policy and practice.

Financial maximization, Strickler notes, is not the same as capitalism itself. It’s a specific, extreme interpretation that reduces every human transaction to a short-term cost-benefit analysis. This perspective, once confined to Wall Street, now drives healthcare pricing, university policies, scientific research, and even personal life goals.

Everywhere the Same Story

To see the effects, Strickler examines three everyday examples: radio, movies, and neighborhoods. When U.S. regulators lifted ownership caps in the 1990s, stations like Clear Channel consolidated over 1,200 outlets. With playlists standardized and DJs replaced by automation, diversity died and profits soared. Hollywood followed suit: by 2018, every top-ten film was a remake or sequel. Cities weren’t spared either—small businesses gave way to chains and banks that could “financially maximize” rent. The vibrant chaos that once defined places like New York’s Lower East Side turned into sterile uniformity.

Even our sense of time, Strickler suggests, has been warped: the horizon of decision-making has shrunk from decades to quarters. We’ve become blind to long-term consequences, treating future generations as externalities. “We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation,” he quotes Tucker Carlson as saying—a rare bipartisan recognition that societies cannot live by profit alone.

Why It Persists

Once defaults become invisible, they perpetuate themselves. We associate financial success with intelligence, power, and virtue; we treat CEOs as heroes and assume that efficiency equals morality. Strickler compares this to philosopher Max Weber’s “iron cage of rationality”—the structure that imprisons us while we believe it to be natural. But every default, he insists, was once chosen. The first step to change is seeing the water we swim in.

When financial maximization met 1970s corporate America, it birthed what Strickler calls the Maximizing Class: consultants, executives, and economists trained to extract value from companies while giving back as little as possible. Their arrival changed the DNA of capitalism itself.

From Retain-and-Reinvest to Downsize-and-Distribute

Historically, companies operated on a “retain and reinvest” model—profits funded new products, higher wages, and worker training. But under the Maximizing Class, that shifted to “downsize and distribute.” Firms slashed wages, laid off workers, and used savings for stock buybacks, inflating share prices and executive bonuses. In 2018, American corporations spent over $1 trillion buying their own stock—more than they invested in R&D. This cycle of hollow prosperity—the Mullet Economy—produced “business in front, party in back”: austerity for workers, windfalls for shareholders.

Strickler shows how wage growth froze after 1973 even as productivity soared. He pairs this with the rise of debt: unable to earn more, workers relied on credit cards and student loans. Economic growth continued, but so did inequality. Today, the top 10% of Americans own 80% of stocks, meaning that profits flow to a shrinking elite while costs—layoffs, pollution, debt—fall on everyone else.

Capturing the Political System

This new class did not confine itself to boardrooms. Through campaign donations and lobbying, it reshaped political defaults too. Strickler cites a 2015 study showing that U.S. congressional election outcomes correlate almost perfectly with campaign spending. Deregulation followed: stock buybacks legalized in 1982, banking restrictions repealed in 1999, and federal R&D budgets cut in half over forty years. The results were predictable—short-term profits for corporations, long-term stagnation for everyone else.

Cultural Consequences

Even education began serving this ideology. UCLA’s long-running freshman survey reveals that in 1970, nearly 80% of students said their top life goal was to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” By the 2010s, that number had plummeted below 50%, replaced by the new #1 priority: “be very well off financially.” The shift from purpose to profit, Strickler argues, is the clearest sign that financial maximization has reshaped not just institutions but imaginations.

What happens when being rich replaces being fulfilled as the goal of life? In the chapter Strickler calls The Trap, he describes a society obsessed with success yet riddled with anxiety—a paradox he experienced firsthand as Kickstarter’s CEO. Publicly celebrated entrepreneurs, he realized, are often privately miserable, trapped by expectations of endless growth.

From Meaning to Money

Using data from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, Strickler charts a cultural inversion: whereas Baby Boomers sought personal meaning, Millennials inherited a system that equates worth with wealth. It’s no coincidence that 41% of Harvard MBAs entered finance by the 1980s, double previous decades. Through examples like Zenefits—once Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing startup—he shows that hypergrowth often ends in burnout and scandal. Its founder, Parker Conrad, confessed to living in constant fear of collapse even as his company approached a $4.5 billion valuation. The world applauded his success but ignored his panic: “He feels petrified,” wrote The New York Times.

The Inner War

Strickler recognized the same dissonance in himself. As CEO, he was expected to be fearless, relentless, invincible—the ideal of the “killer founder” lauded by business magazines. He describes standing in a grocery store line and buying a copy of Harvard Business Review whose cover screamed “Be Paranoid. Go to War. Disrupt Yourself.” What he craved was wisdom; what he found were profit margins. The issue, he decided, wasn’t his ability but the game itself. “Don’t hate the player,” he quips, quoting Ephesians 6:12. “Hate the game.”

A Different Example: Konosuke Matsushita

Relief came from an unlikely source: the writings of Japanese industrialist Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Panasonic. Matsushita’s 1930s essays, collected in Not for Bread Alone, proposed a radically different business philosophy. “Business exists to relieve society from poverty,” he wrote. His company adopted a five-day workweek decades before it became standard—believing that rested, fulfilled workers would be more productive. For Matsushita, profit was a duty, not a deity: “Only by making a reasonable profit—neither too much nor too little—can a business serve society.”

Matsushita’s example restored Strickler’s faith that purpose and prosperity could coexist. The problem wasn’t capitalism per se but which values ruled it. A world governed solely by money, he concludes, becomes spiritually malnourished. Rediscovering complementary values—fairness, generosity, service—is the first step toward repair.

To rebuild meaning beyond profit, Strickler turns to psychology. Drawing on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he argues that financial security is essential—but only as a foundation. Once basic needs are met, chasing more wealth produces diminishing returns. Nobel Prize–winning research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton supports this: emotional well-being rises with income only up to about $75,000 a year. Beyond that, more money stops increasing happiness.

Beyond the Second Rung

If financial maximization traps society on the “second rung” of Maslow’s pyramid, Strickler argues, the next steps—love, esteem, purpose—represent untapped potential. He recalls a conversation with a successful builder who said, “Before I made money, I was a diehard capitalist. Now that I have it, I don’t know what I am.” The man had climbed the ladder only to find it leaning against the wrong wall. Our challenge, Strickler writes, is to help more people make that discovery sooner.

Value vs. Values

Strickler also distinguishes between value (a measurable quantity like price or profit) and values (principles like fairness or purpose). We’ve replaced one with the other. GDP, for instance, treats a thousand dollars spent on chemotherapy and a thousand on a family vacation as equally “positive.” By that logic, divorce lawyers and oil spills contribute to “growth.” The problem isn’t just the metric—it’s the mindset. We measure what we can count, ignoring what counts but can’t be measured.

The Call to Climb Higher

Drawing on Daniel Pink’s Drive, Strickler lists the motives that money cannot buy: autonomy (self-direction), mastery (improvement), and purpose (meaning). He envisions a society that rewards these higher drives as much as it rewards profit. To get there, we need tools to see—and balance—different sources of value. That’s where Bentoism begins.

Bentoism (short for “Beyond Near-Term Orientation”) is Strickler’s answer to narrow rationality. Inspired by the structure of a Japanese bento box, it maps four perspectives that shape our decisions: Now Me, Future Me, Now Us, and Future Us. Each quadrant represents a legitimate form of self-interest, broadening the question from “What’s best for me right now?” to “What’s best for me, us, and the future?”

How It Works

Imagine you’re faced with a choice—say, taking a job or quitting smoking. Now Me might want money or comfort; Future Me considers long-term growth and integrity; Now Us weighs how it affects family or coworkers; Future Us asks what kind of world this creates for others. The goal isn’t perfection but rational self-coherence—a balance among all four voices. Strickler’s own “Bento” guided his decisions from declining misaligned speaking gigs to reconsidering when he should say yes.

Values in Each Quadrant

Now Me values security, pleasure, autonomy. Now Us upholds community, fairness, tradition. Future Me focuses on mastery, purpose, grit. And Future Us seeks awareness, sustainability, knowledge. Each value, Strickler notes, is rational in its own context. A balanced life means allowing all four to speak.

Medicine as a Metaphor

To show how expanding our perspectives leads to breakthroughs, Strickler tells the story of modern medicine. For 2,000 years, doctors practiced bloodletting because they lacked the concept of germ theory. Only when science expanded its “value spectrum” through technology, measurement, and specificity did healthcare escape the Dark Ages. Financial maximization, he argues, is our bloodletting—a primitive tool masquerading as progress. Bentoism is the microscope that can widen our sight of value.

To prove that Bentoist thinking can work in the real world, Strickler collects modern case studies where people and organizations already act beyond financial maximization.

Adele’s Fairness Algorithm

When pop star Adele partnered with startup Songkick in 2015, she used an algorithm to prioritize her most loyal fans for ticket sales, blocking scalpers who resold tickets at outrageous prices. Adele could have profited handsomely from the resale market but chose fairness and community over personal gain—what Strickler calls a “Now Us” choice. The result: fans saved $6.5 million collectively and shared a more inclusive experience.

Basketball and the Three-Point Revolution

Data-driven NBA teams discovered that taking more three-pointers—a previously scorned tactic—optimizes long-term wins over short-term appearance. Like Adele, they redefined value: not each shot but the bigger goal. Within a generation, basketball evolved entirely. For Strickler, this is how change happens: slowly, then suddenly, when evidence and courage align.

Chick-fil-A, FIRE, and Patagonia

Even unlikely examples prove the point. Chick-fil-A forfeits an estimated $1 billion annually by closing on Sundays—an explicit choice to prioritize rest and tradition over revenue. Members of the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement reject consumerism to pursue freedom and purpose. Patagonia, as a legal Benefit Corporation, shares proprietary eco-innovations with competitors for the planet’s sake. Tesla open-sourced its patents to accelerate the adoption of electric cars. Each demonstrates that limiting money’s reach amplifies meaning.

Kickstarter’s own PBC charter—pledging never to exploit tax loopholes and to donate 5% of earnings to arts and equality—embodies the same philosophy. Together, these examples suggest a growing movement of organizations maximizing not just profit but purpose.

Strickler acknowledges that transformation isn’t instant. Inspired by sociologist Karl Mannheim, he introduces the Thirty-Year Theory of Change: roughly the length of one human generation. Every thirty years, what was once radical becomes normal. This timeframe—from the antiseptic method to the three-point shot—is how cultures evolve.

Generations and the Values Helix

Values, he explains, pass like DNA through generations—a process he calls the Values Helix. Each generation absorbs the wisdom and mistakes of the last, then adjusts the code. The challenge isn’t whether change happens—it’s whether we direct it wisely. Humanity is “ten years old in species time,” philosopher Will MacAskill reminds us; our duty is to mature responsibly.

How Change Compounds

Using Thomas Piketty’s analysis of compounding capital, Strickler shows that ideas grow like investments: small, steady shifts become seismic over decades. Recycling, exercise, and organic food were once fringe behaviors; now they’re mainstream. Change accelerates only after years of invisible groundwork—the equivalent of “six months of handstand practice.”

For this reason, Strickler urges patience and persistence. Change is a relay race, not a sprint: our task is to carry values forward, trusting future generations to refine them. The next thirty years, he argues, will determine whether financial maximization fades or mutates—and whether we rise to our potential as Future Us.

In his hopeful conclusion, Strickler returns to economist John Maynard Keynes, who once predicted that after a century of “pretending that foul is fair,” humanity would finally escape the “tunnel of economic necessity” and rediscover its moral bearings. That century ends right about now. Strickler believes the moment Keynes foresaw has arrived: it’s time to replace financial maximization with Values Maximization.

The Values Maximizing Class

He imagines the year 2050, when “Bento Societies” meet monthly to design systems that measure and grow nonfinancial value. Accountants calculate Gross Domestic Value (GDV) instead of GDP, tracking progress not just in profit but in community well-being and environmental health. This “Values Maximizing Class” includes everyone from engineers to artists who use data, empathy, and design to build a world richer in meaning.

Our Role in the Chain

Every person, Strickler writes, is a link in the Values Helix, shaping which ideals survive and which fade. To act with awareness is to accept that responsibility. We cannot rebuild the world overnight, but we can preserve what’s good, reinvent what’s broken, and make choices our future selves will thank us for. “Just because we don’t see the finish line,” he reminds us, “doesn’t mean we lost the race.”