“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Unreasonable… such a charged word in today’s cultural and political landscapes. Watching the news, reading the newspaper, or scrolling through any social media feed, the word seems excessive, preposterous, nonsensical, and intolerable.

And before anyone points a finger and raises an eyebrow at the title of the 1903 book Man and Superman – no, it is not a celebration of patriarchy. Far from it. It is actually a philosophical comedy about how society evolves and how women are the ones pushing the species toward higher forms of intelligence and morality. Against common practice, it is generally always worth investigating beyond titles or headlines.

So let’s start with the definition.

Unreasonable: not guided by good sense. Beyond the limits of acceptability or fairness.

The word reason comes from the Latin ratio — reckoning, calculation, account — from reri, to think. The prefix un-means either “not” or “reverse.”

So unreasonable is, in a literal sense… not thinking.

Not a very reasonable choice for my New Year entry! So why choose it?

Because we are living in an era where fear and anxiety dominate, and our idea of a reasonable solution is to stop everything, blame, and rewind the clock, convinced there was once a golden age when life was better. There wasn’t. There was different, with some good and some bad. Even I find myself saying I would not want to be a teenager nowadays. God, no! Thank goodness there was no Facebook when I had bleached hair, wore silver vinyl pants, and raved through the night. The last thing I would want is for all my adolescent mistakes to live in a world of permanence, threatening to derail my future anytime someone disagreed with me. There has to be a time in life when you can experiment and make mistakes, protected from the whims of sensitive individuals who hold the power to destroy without consequence.

But to say I would want to pull a Marty McFly, go back in time and give up everything we’ve discovered and built? Absolutely not! For all the nostalgia and curated memories, there is no way I would trade rocket launches, satellite maps, health technology, and global connection for AOL at 256 kbps while backpacking through Europe with 15 pounds of CDs and batteries on my back so I could keep my Discman playing Paul Oakenfold, laying the soundtrack for my teenage travels.

It is always easy to romanticize the past when you are safely detached from it. And that detachment is what’s fueling this false sense of reason wrapped in doom and gloom.

As a good techno citizen, I prompted ChatGPT with the following question: “Were Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin reasonable people or unreasonable?”

The answer:

“Love this question. It gets at how progress actually happens. Most of the people you named were unreasonable in their thinking, but reasonable in their ethics or aims. That mix is kind of the secret sauce.

Reasonable people
• Accept reality
• Optimize within constraints
• Preserve stability

Unreasonable people
• Question reality
• Reject constraints
• Create new trajectories

The figures you listed weren’t reckless or irrational. They were selectively unreasonable—about the things that mattered most.”

If you want, I can map this same lens onto:
• explorers vs. administrators
• artists vs. institutions
• founders vs. operators

This reminds me of something I wrote many years ago, a story called WAIT, about the duality of the creative process:

“Nothing would ever be accomplished if we just waited for things to happen. But again, nothing would ever be accomplished if we were not able to wait until completion. Some don’t wait to start but have trouble finishing. Others can’t seem to find the will to start, but once they do, they will finish what they have started—even if they have to wait a lifetime to see the results. You can’t wait for the right conditions. You can’t wait for things to come to you. But you must be able to wait for the unique to manifest. And when it does, all those minutes, all those hours, all those years of waiting suddenly become worth the wait.”

That tension is the same duality found in Yin & Yang; Attraction & Opposition; Light & Darkness; Inside & Outside. One doesn’t exist without the other, and both are necessary. Reasonable and unreasonable are just that, two sides of the same coin. They both have value, pros and cons. Each has its purpose, and depending on the context, they can either build or destroy.

But unlike dreaming, which can be applied as a blanket wish to pretty much anything, being unreasonable is a dream with a purpose. Dreaming has no judgment. You can dream of a world where love abounds as much as you can dream of the perfect job or relationship. But being unreasonable proclaims dissatisfaction with a situation. It is an objection to the status quo, aiming for a better outcome, fed by the belief that there must be something more.

That said, let us not fool ourselves. The only way unreasonable works is when reason supports it. Much like dreaming is nothing without sweat, tears, perseverance, and a bucket of luck, for every Elon Musk, you need a Gwynne Shotwell, a Jared Birchall, and an Alex Spiro. For every Steve Jobs, you need a Steve Wozniak, a Jony Ive, and a Joanna Hoffman. If you can’t find that counterpart or support system, all you will have is an annoying troublemaker arguing about everything.

Our reason is freaking out right now. We look at the world and struggle to make sense of it all. Every day, every minute, every second, we hear that our assumptions are under attack. The future is bleak and on the verge of collapsing at any time. Taking advantage of our evolutionary drive to focus on dangers around us, the media landscape has become a nonstop merry-go-round of doom and gloom. And if this fatalistic belief wasn’t enough to fuel anxiety, we top it off with the depressive classic that we are the root of everything wrong on this planet.

Reason has actually been feeding this cycle of anxiety for decades. Reasonable people who care about the planet have been shouting loud and clear about our demise if we don’t act now. Reasonable people who invented technologies turn around and warn the world that their creations threaten to destroy our species. Reasonable people look at trends and extrapolate the collapse of society. What a wonderful proposition for anyone who wakes up in the morning wanting to put food on the table, pay the bills, and send their kids to school!

If you have experience working with people or children, telling them there is no hope, and if it weren’t for them the world would be better, is certainly the worst strategy for creating long-term engagement. We don’t have to paint a rosy picture or deny urgency, but we can certainly choose a better narrative that focuses on what can be achieved together.

Listen, 81 years ago marked the end of the Second World War. The world was truly broken and devastated. Look where we are today. I don’t want to dismiss the tragedies and hardships, but we have to stop with the doomsday scenarios. We have been in far worse places than this. If there is something humans have proven over and over, it is our capacity to rise and figure it out.

Fun historical facts: Alfred Nobel, for whom the Nobel Prize is named, was once called the “Merchant of Death.” His invention, dynamite, killed millions, but it also changed the world for the better. The same can be said of Fritz Haber, who helped prevent world hunger by feeding billions, yet was also called the “Father of Chemical Warfare.”

Damage… yes.
Demise… no.
Overall improvement… very much so.

Designed by nature, the reasonable thing to do right now is to run and hide. If you truly believe the world is collapsing, the logical reaction is primal: fight or flight. Conserve energy. Protect yourself. React fast. The amygdala goes binary. Defense or attack. Us or them.

That, is reasonable.

But progress has never been born from comfort or retreat. Progress has always come from those who refused to accept the narrative of inevitability. From those who looked at chaos and said: this is not the end of the story.

Being unreasonable does not mean being irrational. It means refusing to surrender imagination. It means rejecting paralysis disguised as prudence. It means believing that repair is possible—even when statistics suggest otherwise.

The reasonable person adapts to fear.
The unreasonable one transforms it.

The reasonable person manages decline.
The unreasonable one designs ascent.

Hate is reactive, tribal and easy.

Hate is reasonable.

Love is disruptive. It requires courage, demands imagination and insists on possibility.

Love … is unreasonable.

Every major leap forward in human history, every abolition, every scientific breakthrough, every expansion of rights, every act of reconciliation, began with someone willing to be unreasonable about the way things were.

So here is our choice:

We can optimize within collapse. Or we can create beyond it.
We can adapt to chaos. Or we can redesign the conditions.
We can build shelters. Or we can build the future.

Choose to build, to imagine, to persist. Choose to love.

CHOOSE UNREASONABLE

On another note, there is much happening at FUTURE of SPACE. After successful and transformative voyages to Antarctica and the Galápagos, we are now working on the Arctic for 2027, and the Total Solar Eclipse in the Kimberley, Australia for 2028.

The Universe is Absurd, with William Shatner & Neil deGrasse Tyson, is back for more, this time in Los Angeles. Stay tuned for more information. Click here if you are interested in getting some tickets.

This April 17-18, we will be in New York, taking our Constellation members to the Explorers Club Annual Dinner. We will also offer a very unique full-day program where our guests will experience the Big Apple in a way that very few ever had.

Before I let you go, my book recommendation to start this year is an absolute gem, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection, by Tamim Ansary

Finally, if you want to see something that embodies the brilliance of being unreasonable with the power of reason, this will blow your mind! The World’s Most Important Machine, produced by Veritasium.

PS. Just for the kick of it, I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of 100 unreasonable individuals in science, technology, arts, philosophy, and culture, leaving aside religion. This is what it gave me:

1. Socrates
2. Galileo Galilei
3. Giordano Bruno
4. Johannes Kepler
5. Isaac Newton
6. Charles Darwin
7. Nikola Tesla
8. Marie Curie
9. Albert Einstein
10. Alan Turing
11. Ada Lovelace
12. Leonardo da Vinci
13. Hypatia
14. Richard Feynman
15. Stephen Hawking
16. Carl Sagan
17. Rachel Carson
18. Jane Goodall
19. Edward O. Wilson
20. Henrietta Leavitt
21. Tim Berners-Lee
22. Linus Torvalds
23. Grace Hopper
24. Margaret Hamilton
25. Vint Cerf
26. Norman Borlaug
27. Jonas Salk
28. Paul Farmer
29. Elizabeth Blackwell
30. Florence Nightingale
31. Steve Jobs
32. Elon Musk
33. Bill Gates
34. Jeff Bezos
35. Thomas Edison
36. Buckminster Fuller
37. Zaha Hadid
38. Antoni Gaudí
39. Le Corbusier
40. Frank Lloyd Wright
41. Vincent van Gogh
42. Pablo Picasso
43. Frida Kahlo
44. Marcel Duchamp
45. Georgia O’Keeffe
46. Andy Warhol
47. Jean-Michel Basquiat
48. Ai Weiwei
49. Banksy
50. Yayoi Kusama
51. Igor Stravinsky
52. John Cage
53. Philip Glass
54. Brian Eno
55. David Bowie
56. George Orwell
57. Virginia Woolf
58. James Baldwin
59. Toni Morrison
60. Ursula K. Le Guin
61. Bob Dylan
62. Hannah Arendt
63. Eleanor Roosevelt
64. Karl Popper
65. Michel Foucault
66. Ernest Shackleton
67. Roald Amundsen
68. Abraham Maslow
69. B.F. Skinner
70. Edmund Hillary
71. Abraham Lincoln
72. Theodore Roosevelt
73. Martin Luther King
74. Nelson Mandela
75. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
76. Thomas Jefferson
77. Louis Pasteur
78. Dolores Huerta
79. Susan B. Anthony
80. Nina Simone
81. Amelia Earhart
82. Yuri Gagarin
83. Neil Armstrong
84. Sally Ride
85. Jacques Cousteau
86. Muhammad Ali
87. Jackie Robinson
88. Billie Jean King
89. Serena Williams
90. Ludwig van Beethoven
91. Henry Ford
92. Daniel Ellsberg
93. Rosa Parks
94. Walt Disney
95. Stanley Kubrick
96. Orson Welles
97. Chef José Andrés
98.Valentina Tereshkova
99. Hayao Miyazaki
100. Desmond Tutu