TREND REPORT DECODER: FUTURE FORECAST 2026
Flexing the framework
If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’re probably curious about trends. And if you’re interested in trends, you’ve likely come across a few trend reports or “predictions” posts over the past month. Maybe you’ve even stumbled upon this year’s massive shared file of 180+ trend reports. But this end-of-year trend frenzy can sometimes cause more confusion and overwhelm than clarity or insight.
I’ve previously shared my approach for decoding these reports: I essentially filter their contents through my framework to analyze which macrotrends are seeing the most attention and how they might be evolving as we move into the new year.
I also always remain on the lookout for sparks of newness that don’t fit within my existing framework, and which might signal emerging concepts. In my experience, this is a very rare occurrence — nearly nothing is actually new. Last year, I added a new macrotrend for the first time in 5 years (Regressive Nostalgia), but its emergence was notably not signaled by any of the reports in the 2025 Trend File.
Still, I do find value in reading these documents — they introduce me to unique signals, offer insight into industries I’m not as familiar with, and provide creative inspiration. Decoding and synthesizing several of these published pieces is a key step in the process of developing my own 2026 Trend Report, which will be published in January. (Note that it will probably be partially paywalled for annual subscriber access, in case you’d like to upgrade now and file that receipt under 2025 expenses!)
In the meantime, I thought that it would be fun to share a little peek into my process. For this post, I’ll be decoding The Future Laboratory’s Future Forecast 2026.
This report is consistently one of my favorite references for insight and inspiration. Each year, they share ~50 trends organized by category. Here’s a snapshot of the 2026 trends:
I personally find it more valuable to think about trends from a category-agnostic perspective. Part of the power of my macrotrend framework is how it helps draw connections between what’s happing in fashion and food, or beauty and travel, for instance. We can see the cross-category links between many of these Future Forecast trends by plotting them across the trend mapping template:
A quick visual comparison between the mapping exercise above, and last year’s version, tells a story of significant change.
For 2025, The Future Laboratory’s trends were more evenly balanced across the framework, but skewed slightly towards the Tech drivers having outsized influence, with the most concentrated activity around the Synthetic Expression and Functional Optimization macrotrends.
This year, the trends skew heavily towards the Human and Social drivers spaces instead. In particular, the Future Forecast 2026 suggests Hyper Pleasure and Collective Kinship may be the two most active macrotrends next year.
Below, I’ve included more detailed analysis per drivers space:
HUMAN DRIVERS
I mapped 14 of the 50 Future Forecast trends as relating to this drivers space, with 8 of them concentrated in Hyper Pleasure. After a year heavily focused on tech-driven optimization, The Future Laboratory is predicting a dramatic shift back to pleasure. Whether through beauty and personal care, food and beverage, retail, or design, the report highlights indulgence, emotion, mood, sensation, intuition, and feeling.
Another 5 trends are aligned to Analog Soul, discussing narrative, materiality, provenance, slowness, imperfection, creativity, and our longing for evidence of humanity. This makes sense, since it was, by far, the most prominent macrotrend in the Trend Radar Database this year.
Finally, only 1 trend, focused on introspective travel experiences, fit within Spiritual Healing. I was somewhat surprised by this, considering all the articles this year about Gen Z’s return to religion and the popularity of Etsy witches.
SOCIAL DRIVERS
17 trends mapped to this drivers space, with 9 of them concentrated in Collective Kinship. ‘Community’ was a major buzzword this past year, and the cultural emphasis on offline socializing and real-world experiences has only continued to grow.
Radical Realism relates to 4 of the Future Forecast trends, noting the prioritization of balance over perfection, the demand to destigmatize taboo topics, the gravitation towards everyday relatability, and the rise of live-streaming.
Another 4 trends are mapped to Sovereign Systems. They are split between a couple that are focused on rethinking traditional life-stages and relationships, and a couple that seem to suggest a Woke 2.0 revival. But I don’t love the way these are framed to center branded “resistance” slogan tees and brand participation in voicing solidarity. I think there is something bubbling up here, but it’s more complex and nuanced, in the vein of Subversive Sincerity.
Finally, the report included no trends relating to Regressive Nostalgia. This is predictably consistent with what I explained in the original writeup — the trend industry wants nothing to do with this particular trend. And I don’t either, honestly, but that doesn’t make Regressive Nostalgia disappear. Instead, ignoring the trend just creates a vacuum of critical dialogue that implodes upon sight of Sydney Sweeney.
NATURE DRIVERS
Only 7 trends mapped to this drivers space, which makes sense, considering that I’ve been lamenting the lack of activity here since July. But I was surprised that none of the trends related to Natural Embrace, which saw more activity this year compared to the other two macrotrends in this space.
Instead, 4 trends mapped to Intelligent Resilience, exploring how industries like beauty and food are preparing for the implications of extreme climate change. This is aligned with what I’ve been seeing in the database recently — an increase of ‘doomerism’ driving more of a ‘prepper’ mentality.
The remaining 3 trends relate to Bioadaptive Balance, with applications across wellbeing, fashion, and design. I find this interesting, since I haven’t personally noticed a particular abundance of related signals here. However, I’ve always felt that this is a very exciting macrotrend that is ripe for innovation and inspiration, so I’ll be keeping an eye out to see whether ideas of biomimicry and symbiosis show up again in other reports, too.
TECH DRIVERS
Another 7 trends mapped to this drivers space, which was a bit shocking, considering how much of the cultural conversation in 2025 revolved around artificial intelligence. The Future Laboratory is ostensibly betting in favor of the AI backlash shifting momentum towards Human and Social drivers spaces next year.
The tech-related Future Forecast trends are fairly evenly distributed across the three macrotrends in my framework. 3 trends relate to Synthetic Expression, while 2 trends each map to Functional Optimization and Creative Codebreaking. I noticed that this report was quite light on discussing longevity-focused optimization, and largely avoided the realm of chaos culture — arguably some of the most dominant topics of 2025 trend-think-piece-news-cycle. Personally, I’m overjoyed by this revelation and will be looking forward to a Labubu-less 2026 (hopefully).
UNMAPPED TRENDS
From the Future Forecast’s 50 trends, there were 5 that did not fit within my framework: Miniature Editions (Beauty), Epicenters of Tomorrow (Travel), Creature Comforts (Luxury - Pet Care), Celebrity Consultancies and Brand Slogans Reimagined (Marketing). I do not currently feel that any of these are particularly significant signals that could indicate emerging macrotrend concepts, but let me know if you disagree!
Absolutely ditto to the pleasure/hedonism/hyper joy seeking macro spaces! Seeing that across lots of research domains. For the unmapped trends, they feel more like category level marketing phenomena than indicative of big socio-cultural swings. This is a challenge I have with big trend reports that tout their trend body count each year, there are always more than a handful of page fillers in there that could have been left in the parking lot until they cluster into a bigger pattern. Just my hot take!