Life Path is a digital framework for organizing a person's activities, thoughts, feelings and ambitions over the course of their lifetime. Through inputting data, users of LifePath are given generated predictions that will advise them on the best path to take.
Most people rarely navigate or interface with their Life Path directly as there is simply too much data to navigate and comprehend. The most meaningful data is curated and Life Path is generally accessed by a myriad of devices that are given what information they’ve been authorized to receive. It’s the equivalent of the process of logging into a third party application with your Facebook or Google account. The main difference is that one's Life Path is controlled by the individual and not a corporation.
In 2084, Life Path is a product that anyone born in the past 40 years has likely had since they were born. It has been steadily collecting, in excruciating detail, a record of their every activity since they in the natal ward. At birth, a person's Life Path is managed by their parents whose right to it steadily loosens until their child reaches the age of consent in their region. By the time that someone is old enough to understand what a Life Path is, their parents may have already filled out their profile and long term goals: their career interests, the school they want to attend, and in some cases their entire plans for their children.
In 2084, the future has already been bought and sold due to predictive technology and the advent of Futures cryptocurrency. Business deals have been secured far in to the future and so have things as simple as premium daycare slots. Those that want to succeed need to make the most important decisions in their life decades in advance for both themselves and their future family. This is a consequence of the fact that the most important and financially lucrative industries (colonization of space, spacecraft engineering, mining and robot systems design) require long term planning. Some colonies are designed fifty years in advance. With the aid of virtualization technology people increasingly work and live inside of a representation of the future they are designing.
What is unknown to users is that their Life Path data is being directly fed to Future Now: an Ecclesia-backed secret project to create the ultimate predictive engine. They are able to acquire this information through a plan that was conceived years ago.
The Ecclesia backed a global legislative plan that pushed for the adoption of a set of standards that would empower the individual with the data that was collected on corporate servers. The Ecclesian leadership knew fully well that these policy decisions would handicap the largest tech companies and force them to restructure their entire systems. Control of data was wrested from the grips of the social media conglomerates (with ket figures who were part of the Ecclessia knowing exactly what was happening) and the monopolies they had fell apart.
Whereas Future Now had developed their entire system around the Life Path data protocols providing an exchange for individuals to sell their data in exchange for services and/or credit. And the survive that Future Now provided was access to opportunities in the future secured by the world most accurate predictive engine.
This has led to a phenomenon called "future fatigue." The idea that people living in the present are exhausted by how much they have to think about and live in the future. By the year 2084, future fatigue had long has since set in for much of the population. People live in a world where they are constantly in a simulation of the future. They grew up with the constant demands of society to plan out in excruciating detail their life or lose their opportunities; even for someone as mundane as restaurant reservations were made years in advance. People now perceive their Life Path as essentially themselves. Every move it has decided you to make has essentially already happened.
Some chose to divorce themselves from their Life Path and this usually means removing themselves from society all together. Though this often requires moving oneself outside the city centres and to places like the depopulated coastal regions, or to Neo-Luddite communes, or even the Russian irradiated zone. Though one's Life Path is never deleted. All the work they completed in the future will live on. Their contribution to the design of the future will live on, though their restaurant reservation will be filled by someone else.
Life Path is run by members of the Ecclesia and used to power their Future Now project. That being said, it does not prevent Ecclesia members from using Life Path and suffering from future fatigue themselves.