My name is Stuart Johnstone, and I convinced hundred of millions of people to give their spare change to those in need.
This is how it happened…
January 1st, 2050
As I’ve grown older, January 1st has become increasingly less blurry. I’ve seen sixty-nine New Year’s Days, and I can remember about forty percent of them. Somewhere around the age of thirty-nine, I decided to stop drinking on New Years Eve. Call me crazy, but I wanted January 1st to be an opportunity for unhindered self-reflection. I wanted to be able to gaze back on the year before with blistering clarity, to really understand achievements and failures. As I aged, this ability to self-reflect became stronger and stronger. By January 1st, 2050, it was like my super-power. I was able to look back on 2049, and all the previous years, and see everything as if it was happening there and then. And, as it happens, 2049 was the best year of my life. It was the year I finally felt like somebody, the year I could finally say ‘my work is done’.
The two events that shaped my 2049 happened because of something I started in 2024. More on that shortly. All you need to know right now is that, by 2049, I had helped to deliver over one trillion dollars to people in need all over the world. To honour this achievement, I was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive a knighthood from King William V. A few weeks after that, I was flown upper-class to Washington DC for a private celebration with President Ocasio-Cortez. Most of the time, when you meet great people, they will look straight through you. They might pretend to care, but most of them would rather be somewhere else. This King and President treated me like a long lost relative they’d waited their whole lives to meet. It was as if I was the superstar, and they were the little people basking in the moment of their lives. Who’d have thought it! These surreal and life-affirming experiences made me ask the question again: ‘How did I get here?’
Back in 2024, the world was a shit-show. At least, that’s how I saw it. In the UK, The Conservative Party was busy wrecking the country, adding insult to injury after leaving the EU eight years before. In the US, Donald Trump, a man who had effectively committed treason by inciting civil war, was about to become President for the second time. Wars were breaking out all over the world. The Israeli’s continued to ravage Palestine after the Hamas terror attacks the year before. Russia and Ukraine were still locked in conflict after two years. The US and the UK were bombing Houthi targets in Yemen following incursions into neutral shipping lanes. Even after the lessons of World War Two and numerous other conflicts in the twentieth century, it seemed like World War Three could break out at any time. While the masters of war executed their plans, individuals and communities weren’t faring much better. The rise of social media over the previous twenty years had created a generation of prima donna’s – people obsessed with themselves and motivated only by the number of likes their latest video was getting. Smartphones had become so ubiquitous, that they were like another body part, welded organically to the hand. Nobody looked up from these things, unwittingly substituting real life and real meaning for virtual nonsense. Communities were disintegrating all over the world. Money that had previously been available to fund local projects was disappearing fast, leaving families without help and kids to roam the streets. In my own neighbourhood, nobody spoke to each other, and I was convinced that if I’d been burning to death on the sidewalk, nobody would have stopped to help. Of course, some people had a different view of the world. But my view, perhaps influenced by my own idealistic mindset, was that it was a shit-show.
The spark that changed my life came from a mundane piece of life admin. I decided to open an online bank account! I had resisted doing this for years because I was a finance traditionalist. I liked to keep my cash in a bank I could visit, where I could talk to real people and feel confident the place could not be compromised by hackers. I even kept some money under my bed! By 2024, my friends had convinced me to open a bank account via a smartphone app. The process turned out to be straightforward, risk-free, and the rewards far outweighed what I’d previously been used to. So, before too long, I was an online banking convert, taking advantage of every reputable app that came along. One of these online banks offered a product they called the Round-Up account. It gave the saver the option to round up purchases to the nearest dollar and save the balance in a separate account earning a high interest rate. It meant that if I spent $19.50, I’d save fifty-cents and earn eight-percent interest on it. Over time, this rounding up added up, and I was left with a small pile of savings from contributions I didn’t miss. After all, who misses spare change? At first, it seemed like a no-brainer. Then, after a while, I started to think about it more deeply. After six months of making contributions into my Round-Up account, I was left with only $150. This included all the interest that had been added to it. For a man earning a decent salary and with higher-than-average savings, this was money I didn’t need. Sure, it would help me buy a nice dinner or a few bottles of vintage wine, but it wouldn’t make any real difference to my life. That’s when I had a thought. THE thought.
By a stroke of outrageous luck, the opportunity to voice this thought came around one month later. The company I worked for, a global advertising agency, hosted talks by interesting and important people in society. These people were invited in from the world of business, politics, media, technology – anybody who had something interesting to say or a unique view. The speaker in this session just happened to be the CEO of the online bank that offered the ‘Round-Up’ account. I know what you’re thinking. It sounds like he’s making it up! I assure
you this happened exactly as I say. After he’d spoken for forty-five minutes or so, I put my hand up and took my chance. ‘I’ve used your Round-Up account for six-months’ I said ‘and I don’t really need the money. What if, instead of keeping the money you round up for yourself, you give it away to people in need?’. At first, the CEO looked bemused. In a world so focused on individual success, why would anybody want to be so altruistic? Had he not heard this idea before? Was it not obvious? It appeared not. After a long pause, he smiled and held the microphone up to his mouth. ‘You know’ he said ‘I’d like to say that we’d thought of that, but we haven’t. Nobody in the organisation, to my knowledge, has put this idea forward’. Then, he walked to the front of the stage and looked straight at me: ‘Let’s take this offline, and we’ll see what we can do’.
A week or so later, I found myself sitting in the CEO’s office. I couldn’t believe it. He’d remembered our exchange at the agency and invited me in to discuss my suggestion. I expected him to give me thirty-minutes and send me away with a branded notebook. But this couldn’t have been further from the truth. Over the next few hours, we discussed the state of the world, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, The Super-Bowl, The Beatles, Martin Scorsese and, eventually, the Round-Up account. He asked me how I thought they could turn it into a tool for good. At this point, I realised I hadn’t really thought it through. ‘Well’, I said, ‘the first thing I’d like to say is that you have an opportunity to do something no other bank seems to be doing – an opportunity to change the world and lead other corporations to do the same’. I don’t know where this babble came from! ‘Mmmm’, he said, ‘Do you think people will actually go for it?’. I went on to explain my belief that people’s basic nature is good, and if asked in the right way, they would embrace the chance to be altruistic. ‘Spare change’ I said ‘means nothing to most people. Give them the option to give it away! If they don’t want to, they don’t have to’. I suggested that the bank should set up a fund, managed by a Foundation within the organisation, and invite applications from individuals and communities that needed money. ‘It’s an opportunity’, I said, ‘to bridge the gap that government can’t bridge, to remove the red tape, and to get money to people in need quickly and seamlessly’. The CEO stood up from his desk, walked across the room and shook my hand: ‘It’s a great idea. I’ll talk to my team’.
A month or so went past, and I heard nothing. I accepted it had been an exotic little adventure that would come to nothing. Something to tell the Grandchildren about. I continued to gripe about the world and see the worst in everything. Then, out-of-the-blue, on a lazy Friday afternoon, I got a call from the CEO. ‘We’re doing it!’ he said, ‘It’s actually going to happen!’. It turns out the CEO had left our meeting and gone straight to his board, recommending that they offered a Round-Up Giveaway option ASAP, and setting the ball rolling on the infrastructure needed to manage and distribute funds. He told me he’d given his team a deadline to get the option live, and that there would be a global advertising campaign launching to support it. ‘And’ he said, ‘we want you to be in the TV ad’.
By mid-2024, I’d gone from being a nobody to having my face beamed into living rooms across the world. I was told the TV ad for the Round-Up Giveaway account was seen by 1.5 billion households in 165 countries. The script had me discovering the Round-Up option, enjoying it for a while, then having the light-bulb realisation that I didn’t need the money. ‘This is your chance’ I say in the ad ‘to discover your true nature, to feel good at the end of the day, to make giving the new receiving – Round-Up and Giveaway Now!’ I press the ‘Round-Up Giveaway’ button on the app, and the script cuts to a young family, smiling in a park on a sunny day, with two kids playing on glimmering playground equipment. The TV ad was part of one of the biggest advertising campaigns in history. Media platforms – including the likes of Google and Meta – lined up to offer free advertising space. My face, along with the Round-Up Giveaway option, was splashed across TV’s, cinema screens, newspapers, magazines, social media, buses, trains, and stadiums globally. From that point forwards, I couldn’t look back, and nor did I want to. I embraced the role, praying to God that people would do as I predicted and ‘Round-Up and giveaway’.
By now, you’ve probably guessed that it worked. In fact, it worked better than anybody could have imagined. The Round-Up Giveaway account, and the advertising campaign that supported it, created a wave of Altruism-mania that kept going and growing. Around twelve months after the launch, it was announced that it had generated over one billion dollars for those in need. It had changed the lives of more people in one year than government programs had in the last decade. Other online banks had followed suit in offering a version of the Round-Up Giveaway, and they had all been as successful in encouraging people to give away. The real explosion came in mid-2025, when the first high-street retailers decided to offer a version of the program at point-of-sale. They gave people the option of rounding up store purchases, however small, so even a kid buying a candy bar for 99 cents could choose to give away 1 cent. It was beautiful. Before too long, it was difficult to find any stores that weren’t offering the option to round up spare change and give it away. From Macey’s to Merv’s Vintage Sweets, they were all doing it, paying the proceeds into funds set up by online banks, who worked with a cross-section of experts to qualify applications. It spread like wildfire all over the world, and the flames turned out to be eternal.
By the end of 2025, I had become one of the most famous people in the world. In January 2026, I won Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award. In 2027, I won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2029, I had my life dramatized in a movie that went onto win Oscars. Whilst I didn’t become rich, I enjoyed a level of adoration few could ever dream of experiencing. I was on cloud nine.
Despite all this, nothing gave me more satisfaction than meeting the people whose lives were changed by the Round-Up Giveaway. I made a point of meeting as many beneficiaries as possible, and their stories kept me pushing to expand the program.
In 2024, for the first time ever, corporations worked with individuals and communities without any ulterior motive, to help those most in need. As I had predicted when I first suggested the idea to the CEO, it brought out the best in people, and tapped into their innate desire to be altruistic. It thrust the idea of giving, alongside spending and saving, into the mainstream, and evolved into a true movement. In turn, it changed the lives of people all over the world in the best possible ways. I met individuals who were able to overcome serious personal challenges. I visited communities that achieved fundamental change and progression in years rather than decades. In some cases, Round Up Giveaway helped to improve the outlook for entire countries. How did this happen? It happened because the program replaced unfit solutions offered by government, getting rid of red tape and delivering help fast. The Round-Up Giveaway offered the fundamental change the world needed, a change that finally unleashed the unrealised dream of People Power.
Now, in 2050, I can genuinely say we live in a society that is much less motivated by personal gain – so different from 2024. Things are bright, things are positive, and people work together.
And I still give away my spare change every day…
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