As we are on the cusp of starting 2025 I’ve been reflecting on some hopes I expressed towards the start of this decade.

20 hopes for the 2020s

I found writing ‘10 hopes for the Tens‘ a useful exercise, particularly in re-visiting those hopes as the decade progressed.

On reflection I remember I struggled a bit putting together enough hopes to satisfy my headline full of ’20s’ and by ‘Hope number 15’ I was starting to pad it out a bit with some very broad statements like – “We’ve seen the last of Donald Trump and his like”

Along with a fair proportion of the World at that time I never imagined Donald Trump becoming US President again and would have put a sizeable bet on him being in prison by the middle of the decade.

Even as I was writing about Kamala Harris towards the end of 2021, there were questions being raised as to her suitability for President, and so the idea that the 2024 Presidential election would come down to ‘Harris versus Trump’ seemed extremely unlikely.

Approaching us being a quarter of the way through the 21st Century – the start of which seemed a very long way off for this onetime kid in the 1970s who loved a weekly dose of 2000AD (BTW – so cool that it’s still a thing – https://2000ad.com/ ) – this Century keeps on throwing up those “I can’t believe that just happened moments” ( Wikipedia nails it beautifully – Timeline of the 21st Century )

But here we all stand – on the threshold of another Trump presidency.

Although I gave up trying to predict stuff on the first iteration of this blog I did post on LinkedIn a few days before Trump’s win that I had a “horrible sinking feeling that our cousins across the pond are going to vote him back in”.

Conscious of the echo chamber and filter bubble effects, I make a point of following representatives from both sides of a debate on social media (whether that’s climate change, AI or politics). So I think that at a subliminal level I was picking up on a vibe on the platform, particularly around the increasing activities of Elon Musk.

Beyond unbelievably being legally allowed to bribe the US electorate with a million dollar chance to win if they voted for Trump, I got a sense that his wealth and digital capability were going to be targeted at just the right spots in the swing states to make all the difference. Naturally there are some quite compelling conspiracy theories about what happened in those states but I’m sure they’ve already been squashed one way or another by the World’s richest man and his new best buddy, the incoming 47th President of the United States of America.

And that leads nicely to Hope number 17 – “Technology starts helping society again rather than increasingly undermining it”

Elon Musk has blown that one out of the water during the last 12 months.

Time will tell whether he becomes a force for good or evil over the next four years but the way he bought himself a powerful digital platform and used it very effectively to secure himself a seat in the Oval Office will no doubt be debated as a total abuse of technology in the future.

So what about Hope 18? – “We truly ‘build back better’ following on from the pandemic”

Hmmm – whatever happened to those bold BBB announcements on both sides of the pond post pandemic?

Well in the UK it seems it was another Boris Johnson “Get Brexit Done” type soundbite.

There’s not much commentary about the bold vision a few years on and I guess that just illustrates our extremely short span of attention and the speed with which we are more than happy to get back to ‘Business as Usual’ – despite the fact that is increasingly being recognised as being entirely unsustainable on a planet with finite resources.

The best commentary I could find was from Citizens Advice in Scotland. I wonder how optimisitic that writer is another three years on?

Another BoJo phrase from the pandemic years was reflected in my Hope number 19 – “We truly start listening to ‘the science’ “

The article I linked to back then featured Greta Thunberg telling Trump and his administration to do just that, as he was on the verged of squashing yet more of California’s legislation to reduce vehicle emissions.

Sadly, during the last six months since returning to LinkedIn there has been a ground swell in Climate Change Denial commentary on that platform with very little being done about it.

I’ve tried to take a stand a few times on LinkedIn against this tide of fake profiles and misinformation but it all seems rather futile currently as the platform itself is not making the right changes to prevent misinformation from proliferating beyond its control.

Now we come to the all encompasing Hope number 20 – “We make the world a better place for our children and their children”

Amongst my many personal hopes and self improvement desires for this decade (some of which I am fast peddling on due to early failures) is the hope that I do become a grandparent in the next five years.

It appears pretty likely to happen but that fills me with happiness and dread.

Based on the longevity of my dear departed parents I’m not anticipating living much beyond 2050 – and that’s if I’m lucky.

However, when I consider that a child born in the next five years can realistically ‘hope’ to live beyond the turn of next Century then the outlook is potentially horrific.

Let’s hope we focus on doing the right things and embrace regenerative sustainability.

“After so many years of an extractive approach, we now need to have a regenerative outlook, where we give back much more than we take. This is how we can reduce our planet’s prevailing ecological deficit, emissions and pollution levels.”

First a note about the headline.

I started secondary school as punk rock became mainstream and, much to my parents’ horror, I loved The Sex Pistols and later Public Image Ltd/John Lydon.

That’s reflected in my Ten Top Tens on here that I put together to celebrate getting my hearing back with advanced digital hearing aids back in 2012.

Former Pistol’s front man John Lydon uses the “I could be wrong, I could be right” line in his stage show and it is a lyric from anti-apartheid song Rise he created with PIL. You can always count on the former ‘Johnny Rotten’ to give it to you straight and I’ve always loved how he can still cause chaos all these years later, even though he has mellowed a lot with age and personal tragedy, like the loss of his beloved wife Nora to the ravages of dementia.

In 2009 I kicked off commenting on various aspects of my working and home life in a blog entitled “2020 Visions – Imagining the World my Children will inherit”

I’ll let the category cloud give you an idea of what I’ve been pontificating about mainly over the years.

Embedded below are a selection of 24 posts from the last 15 years with captions commenting on if or where things have changed and, indeed, whether I was wrong or right in those observations.

All highly subjective and viewed through my lens of course but hopefully makes for some interesting reading.

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With each new experiment in AI’s capability and potential I feel I am going through a grief cycle while navigating a hype cycle !!!!

As I climb the slope of enlightenment on my own journey in understanding AI I am feeling a degree of frustration, perhaps bordering on a bit of anger, that more skills that have been a hallmark of my career are potentially being marginalised or made completely redundant.

First some context.

After studying Communications, Advertising and Marketing at college my ambition was to work in an advertising agency.

Initially I worked for a printers as a paste up artist and then got a job helping organise exhibitions around the UK for a construction equipment manufacturer – a massively fun job travelling to all corners of the country, staying in hotels and having drinking competitions with Irish digger drivers.

All the time I was bombarding local marketing and advertising agencies with letters and CVs (which I still have so I can remind my daughters what job hunting used to entail).

Eventually one hit the mark and I joined what ultimately became one of the most successful marketing and advertising agencies in the region – The Lawton Communications Group – https://lawtoncommsgroup.com/

I joined as the late 80s boom turned to the early 90s bust and the agency’s house-building and tourism accounts were hit hard. However my focus was growing trade and technical accounts including the likes of Cobham, Meggitt and Racal.

One tech account really caught my eye – a company called National Transcommunications Limited – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arqiva – which had just been formed out of the privatisation of the engineering division of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, continuing the sell off of ‘the family silver’ the Government had begun during the mid 1980s.

When the time seemed right I jumped ship to this organisation with the brief of setting up and running an internal marketing and advertising agency.

It was the start of an incredible decade right in the heart of the digital revolution that stretched my skills and knowledge immensely and ultimately set me off on a completely new path.

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The day after our wedding on the late May bank holiday weekend in 1994 we headed to New York City filled with excitement and some trepidation.

A period of zero tolerance policing had made the City a bit safer from it’s peak crime period in the late 80s and early 90s when a crack epidemic sent criminality soaring.

Friends and relatives were still of the opinion that we would be shot the moment we emerged from our hotel, such was the negative worldwide perception of the largest city in the US at that time.

Suffice it to say we had a fantastic time from beginning to end and certainly fell in love with The Big Apple.

We returned to NYC a year later en route to Australia to get the wintertime Xmas experience and fell even deeper in love with the place.

Around the turn of the century I visited New Jersey on business as the US Telecoms company I was working for had many big offices around the state and on one occasion I drove into Manhattan to give a UK colleague a flavour of the City.

I was still working for the US company when the 9/11 tragedy befell the country and particularly NYC. Some of my US colleagues were directly affected by the horrendous terrorist attack, a couple being on the planes that hit the World Trade Center, and others knowing people who had died.

Lucent – the company I was working for – was heavily involved in the aftermath of the attacks, setting up emergency cell systems in the immediate area of ground zero devastation.

We had enjoyed those iconic buildings in the skyline and had visited them too so I think it was the immense sadness that they no longer existed and had been destroyed in such a horrific way that meant we didn’t reconsider revisiting NYC again for many more years. Even our 20th and 25th wedding anniversaries seemed too soon to return.

30 years seemed right and also an excellent opportunity to help rekindle our relationship after a rough time of my making.

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Back in the 1990s I spent a lot of time commuting in and out of London for work.

I came to absolutely loathe it !!!

Not just the uncomfortable travel on increasingly unreliable railway infrastructure in antiquated slam door carriages that were well past their sell by date, but the crowding, noise, filth and polluted air of the Capital itself.

I must admit I was concerned when my eldest daughter chose to move to London and embrace it so wholeheartedly in her career.

However, in supporting her while she has moved around regularly from one rent to another and now the commitment she has made to buying her first property, I have visited London a lot again in recent years.

Her first project was as an assistant construction manager on One Grosvenor Square – https://1gsq.com/ – not a bad starting point for a career.

She then moved to a project in Islington working on the renovation of Finsbury Tower – https://www.jcoffey.com/projects/finsbury-tower/.

The reception area development that she proudly project managed was featured on an episode of The Apprentice when they used the newly revamped offices to conduct the infamous interviews with the final candidates.

On her next project I was delighted to be given a tour around during construction – Nova in Victoria – https://www.macegroup.com/projects/nova-victoria .

Her early responsibilities included managing concrete pouring for the distinctive phase two lower columns and then the floors as they were added.

After the official topping out my wife and I were invited to take a tour down through the 15 stories to see how each level was taking shape. Being a bit of a nerd I was fascinated to see how each level was getting closer and closer to completion as we headed to the ground floor.

Today, she is working on the Timber Square project near the Tate Modern – an important ‘net zero’ orientated development that will set new standards in large scale office and residential buildings – https://www.macegroup.com/media-centre/mace-to-deliver-grade-a-office-redevelopment-in-central-london-for-landsec

One of London’s biggest development projects in recent years has been the amazing regeneration in and around Battersea Power Station. My daughter’s employer has been a major contractor on varying elements of that project https://www.macegroup.com/projects/battersea-power-station and she has been brought in to work on it occasionally when extra support has been needed.

For me, this is a very tangible example of how London has changed over the last 20 years.

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