I met a 40 year old man this week who had lost his job earlier in the year. He'd been working as a cleaner for a private contractor, and had been summarily dismissed along with a group of colleagues, with no explanation and no notice. He described a very familiar pattern in his life. At first he had continued getting up early in the morning, looking for jobs, and attending the Job Centre. After several hundred applications he found himself getting up later and later. Doing even one thing in the day became hard work. He was spending ever more of his time watching TV, and had almost stopped travelling (and hadn't been into the centre of London for six months). His children came to spend every other weekend with him which had become about the only interesting thing in his life, but he was finding it very hard to entertain them because he was so desperately short of cash.

Everywhere we hear similar stories. One of the effects of the slowdown is that people's horizons shrink. They travel less, get out less, hope less. It becomes much harder to plan ahead, or even to imagine where they might be in five years time.

I increasingly think that alongside helping people with the practical skills of finding jobs (which we're doing with projects like Fastlaners) we also need better ways of mobilising and maintaining optimism. It's in part what the various resilience projects do - our most recent one working with teenagers in West London at risk of joining gangs. But it goes further than developing individual skills and confidence.

Exactly the same issues arise with families. One of the biggest differences between families that thrive and ones that fall apart is that the thriving ones have a shared sense of the future and what they might do together to get there. It's also the biggest difference between communities and cities that thrive and those that don't.

I remember being particularly struck by this a couple of years ago travelling around Aboriginal communities in the outback of Australia, which reminded me of some of the time I spent on lots of depressed housing estates in England in the worst years of the 1980s. You could easily get your head around the physical dilapidation, and even the health problems and the lack of jobs. But what was most disorienting was the fact that no one had any sense of a future, even two years ahead, and nowhere was there any discussion of what that might be. Instead people were trapped in an eternal present, getting by day to day (sometimes helped by alcohol and drugs, or in Australia by sniffing petrol).

So having a future turns out to be as important as having a past - it anchors us, gives shape to our lives. But it's not automatic - it has to be cultivated - and maybe the presence or absence of a future is now one of the most important inequalities.