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Cras es nostermeans in Latin that "the future is ours". In Japanese kaizen refers us to "future", meaning "what is forward", as the Hebrew term kadima. Speech has always had the future by reference, regardless of language or culture; we find there the term referring what "comes next". The future is ours because we are the ones who live in this present, but as the current presentness increasingly shortens the distance between present and the near future, the future is no longer thought of as a collective or civilizer one. Except in China, but China is not a country, it is a civilization. And that says it all. In this context it would be interesting to look at our relationship with the future at a time when individualism and egocentrism reign.

The future is an image of what comes next, which can be constructed from the present, as in the "metatopia", but because everything that appears again appears as entirely new, what we have is a "prototopia". The newness forces us to keep studying, analyzing, and learning again. We are perpetually newcomers to a world that has always seemed like a civilization of seniors. The old is the new "new." When we look back we see reflections of the future. When we glimpse images of the future, we revisit the past. The protagonists change, but the stories repeat themselves. We realize a disturbing repetition in the future that makes us think of time as a circular tyranny. What happened once will happen again, what will happen seems similar to what has already happened. Our current dilemma is to know what the present is for. Now, we are too busy to realize what is going on around us. The future is under construction and in the past there is too much past to get a sense of what has been built up until then, until today.

From the Objectivists’ point of view, like Ayn Rand, nothing should be interposed between us and the world. No one is mightier than the entrepreneurial individual. What counts is objective reality. This is how we can conceive "the future as our future, because we undertake it, because we build it. The future is not a random thing to happen, but rather an extrapolated present. We stopped living the now to project the tomorrow. But on the other hand, it also seems that we stopped thinking about tomorrow to live the now obsessively. In either case we are faced with a dimension of time, not space. The future is a time of projection that will be and is already ours. The present is ephemeral and we lose it to an agglutinating and massive past, in which everything fits and everything tyrannically encompasses.

The future has become the domain of goals, an aim, a place to reach, from there the concept of "metatopia", but this future forces us to be constantly over-informed, reduces us to the condition of eternal learners. We must always be attentive and alert to the prototypical. In this new concept of the future, the "future" belongs to entrepreneurs, creators and idealists, pattern recognizers and new age contraption sympathizers.

It should be clarified that there are two clashing concepts: on the one hand we have "futurity", and on the other we have "narratives of the future". Futurity is all that comes with the signature of "style of the future", better saying, it is the future itself, but the narrative of the future is all that is designed to us in the present about the future. It is the future as a story told, as a stylistic goal, a prototype that seduces and guides us, and even a beacon that guides our imagination. Thinking about the future now is thinking about its narrative, its purpose, how it shapes us and what kind of repercussions it has on our objective reality. In fact, this concept is in accordance with the society of desire, which replaced the society of consumerism. Besides, something that will determine our condition is precisely the reality of objectivism, the practical dimension of reality, the constructible future, the achievable reality. In such an entrepreneurial dimension of reality, the future is ours (cras es noster) and we should think kadimaor kaizen. We should look forward and engage ourselves in to a medium/ long term.

Currently, in Asia and, in particular in China, the future is considered extremely important in the long term. Both Europe and the United States are too busy with their present, objectivist and prototypical agendas, yet these are utopian in terms of political aims. China shows such a development that it seems to us a strange "foreign" reality. Chinese governmental authorities have not yielded to the economy of the immediate; they are investing in parallel to the narrative of the future because they are present in various sectors. It is no coincidence that in science fiction many of the images of the future are from Asia. At this moment, Asia is synonymous of futurism, or better saying, of a narrative of the future. And the world is too small for China, just as China is too small for the Chinese people.

Collective futures can only be found in Asia. Europe and the US are distracted by the present, the heterogeneities and political-cultural differences. Meanwhile, China is planning on its own, for itself and for us. Asiatization of the world implies making concessions to China. The image that wins is the image of China's future, of its inescapable and magnanimous development.