Contours of Tomorrow

I was talking with a friend recently about the framework behind Contours of Tomorrow, and we eventually drifted into the familiar territory of right and wrong. It didn’t take long to notice a tension.

Contours of Tomorrow doesn’t come with a strict rulebook. There’s no tidy list of dos and don’ts. Instead, it offers ways of looking at situations - lenses you can use to examine what’s happening, what’s changing, and what your actions might shape next. That works reasonably well for adults who have some experience, patience, and the ability to sit with uncertainty.

But imagine trying to teach that approach to a child.

“Think carefully about emergence.”
“Consider long-term persistence.”
“Hold space for competing needs.”

That’s a tall order when someone is still figuring out why bedtime matters.

Why Rules Keep Appearing

This may be one reason so many cultures and religions developed clear moral guidance. Some frame it as wisdom passed down through generations. Others describe it as commandments handed down from on high. Either way, the pattern is the same: when abstract reasoning is hard, concrete guidance helps.

The Ten Commandments are a familiar example, at least in Western culture. Set aside their theological framing for a moment and look only at the content. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. These aren’t especially exotic ideas. They show up, in one form or another, almost everywhere humans have tried to live together.

Whether those ideas are divinely inspired or simply hard-won lessons is a separate question from whether they’re broadly useful.

No Holy Book, Still a Compass

Contours of Tomorrow doesn’t claim a holy book or a higher authority issuing decrees. The closest thing it has is a willingness to learn from those who’ve walked similar paths before us - and to question that guidance when circumstances change.

Still, it’s fair to ask for a starting point. A reference. Something you can hold up against a decision and say, “Does this feel aligned?”

That’s where the Ethical Touchstones come in.

What a Touchstone Is

The word touchstone originally referred to a small stone used to test the purity of precious metals. You didn’t shape the gold with it. You didn’t worship it. You simply touched the metal to the stone to see what kind of mark it left.

The stone didn’t give orders. It offered feedback.

That idea carries forward well. Ethical touchstones aren’t commandments. They’re reference points. When faced with a choice, you can “touch” the decision against them and see what shows up.

A Small, Ordinary Example

Imagine a simple situation: you’ve committed to help a colleague with something after work, but by late afternoon you’re exhausted. No one would blame you for canceling. It would be easy. It would also be easy to justify.

Running that decision past a touchstone doesn’t produce a rule, but it does produce questions. Does backing out erode trust that’s been built over time? Does showing up, even imperfectly, contribute to something larger than this single interaction? What version of the relationship persists after today?

You might still decide to cancel. Or you might decide to show up for fifteen minutes instead of an hour. The touchstone doesn’t decide for you. It simply reveals the tradeoffs more clearly.

Working Models, Not Final Answers

It helps to think of the touchstones the way we think about scientific theories.

Newton’s laws of motion are not the final word on physics. They break down at very small scales and very high speeds. And yet, they’re still taught, still used, and still incredibly useful. You can build bridges and launch satellites without ever invoking relativity.

The Ethical Touchstones work the same way. There are simple versions that are easy to grasp and apply quickly. As you gain experience, you start to notice nuance, edge cases, and tensions between them. You refine how you use them without discarding them altogether.

They are provisional by design - meant to be tested, revised, and clarified as we learn more about ourselves and the systems we inhabit.

An Invitation, Not an Instruction

This isn’t an attempt to replace anyone’s moral framework, nor to suggest that Contours of Tomorrow has uncovered something uniquely correct. It’s simply an offering: a toolset that seems to align well with how complex systems behave and how human choices ripple forward in time.

If you’re curious, the Ethical Touchstones are described in more detail here. They aren’t meant to be memorized so much as revisited, tested, and occasionally argued with.

If this way of looking at things helps you think more clearly, act more intentionally, or explain your reasoning to someone who needs a place to begin, then it’s doing its job.

If not, that’s useful information too.

Touchstones, after all, aren’t there to tell us who we are. They’re there to help us see what we’re leaving behind.