Education. It is already known and familiar to see tailored education programs on the market. Famous universities open up with free online classes. Bootcamps are flourishing to train IT professionals and respond economies’ increasing labour demand in the field. Traditional diploma universities have difficulties in responding the specialized labour demand at the speed of changes in the economic environments, especially under direct impact of technology implications in all life areas. People of the future are the ones to take the lead in education. With short term, intensive, “shot” like trainings, they will develop the versatility to respond the needs of the present, and consequently make career changes to adapt to contemporary market needs. Most importantly, the number of individuals that feel not accomplished by not following their gifted skills and talents, namely the candidates to burnout, will diminish by the availability of such education that allows to re-adjust as many times and as often as one needs to reach balance and accomplishment, hence protect mental health.
Work. Integration of work and personal lives will replace the “work – life balance”. As shown in OECD reports and supported by futurists, work and personal lives integration is the new way forward. Building the flexibility around working and personal needs, allows a smooth integration of achieving individual contribution, achievement through work and being there for your child, partner and loved ones. This can only bring positive results on employers (obtaining a higher engagement from the employee and higher productivity) and for the employee (by joggling the personal and work commitments).
Vacation. Time off will become object oriented vacation. People will choose to do activities instead of laying down on the sand or visiting places. They will immerse themselves into the places by taking active part to the life there, a total change of landscape and mental involvement into totally new and radically different activities. Think about people going in the middle of nowhere for two weeks time off and study for half a day, every day; people going in the country side to prepare jam or learn an old crafting method; people taking time off to work voluntarily for the less lucky fellows. That will all be normality. Relaxing retreats will still exist but people will feel more and more the need to actually see the results of their work, to get the real feel of the interaction with the nature, to spend days off constructively, in simple and meaningful ways.
Social media. The concept will switch to topic focused instead of individual oriented. The way we interact via different social media platform will change. “Like” and “Follow” to a certain individual, feeding the “influencer” ego, will be replaced by contributions to topics that improve knowledge, travel, business, in general create value to the society thru interaction of several individuals. Participants on the social media will thus have the chance to educate, learn and ease their day-to-day life areas of interest by practical applicability of a certain topic on their lives and evolution.
The future will be more disruptive than we can foresee now as obvious. We will see corporate people going in the country side to work the land and they will call that vacation. Educational versatility will allow us to re-shuffle and adjust to present as per the contemporary needs, hence we will feel so much more valuable. Social media will have to get healthy and move towards real contributions of individuals to values and issues of the society. All of these changes will enable the individual to reach a higher version of himself, improving the productivity, inner value and social contribution. These are critical environment elements for an individual to get the right context to focus efficiently on their physical and mental health and, ideally, contribute to reduction or, even better, the elimination of the burnout epidemic around the world.