The future has been annihilated. Let's get it back.
Thinking about the world we are becoming
We are whisked around, caught in a frenzied dance between hope and fear. Look this way for nuclear annihilation, that way for people power. See the bleached coral and the fires; watch that solar stock tick upwards; despair, donate, dream. Can it really be that bad? Must make better choices. Ask AI for answers, delight in being validated. Wonder if another petal just dropped from your mind. Witness genocide. Again. This one’s on all of us. Fly guiltily, can’t afford the train or the time. Take heart from news of a cancer breakthrough. Pay the bills, just about. Worry about jobs for the kids. Ignore it all, for this is TV’s golden age. Never been better. Fight for equality! Join politics; maybe snag a win; delivery is another matter. Let the cycle recommence.
Stop.
This is our rhythm. Fragments of everything crowd in on us, relentlessly. We catch glimpses of possibility here and there, but the backdrop is grim. Global crises weigh heavily if we let ourselves think about them. The media reports scientific studies outlining climatic tipping points we can barely imagine. Democracy, where it exists, offers its bright moments, but… are those really the zeitgeist? Technology is precisely everywhere in our lives, but deep down we wonder why, and ache to be free of it, at least some of the time. War is back on the table, squarely in the middle of it actually.
As for ourselves, even those of us not immediately ravaged by calamity are locked into systems and ways of living that don’t care for us to thrive, not really. Are we flourishing? Best ignore the question. We grit our teeth and press on.
If there is anything beyond the now, is it not some kind of collapse? Will there be an ending, or renewal, or just eternal hopes for renewal in this elongated present?
Something about progress is broken. We seem to have become stuck, caught in a loop of the same anxieties, the same patterns with no way out.
I hesitate to reach at this point for George Orwell, but his early memoir of living in squalor left what seems to me a useful clue about our predicament:
“You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.”
It is as though we are experiencing something similar at a collective level. The cultural critic Mark Fisher extended the diagnosis to our wider societal life. He argued that capital has created a state of permanent structural instability that simply cancels the long-term. Our culture and politics are condemned to repeat the same exhausted forms over and over.
We enter a mental world of ennui and procrastination. Nothing beckons anymore; all that is left is to protect ourselves from an unsafe world.
And yet.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” — Arundhati Roy
The quiet deceit we face today is that everything we are living through is historically inevitable. Not quite in an “end of history” sense, but still. This-here-today is the necessary culmination of all that has come before. It’s here to stay.
But, not true. Nothing is or was inevitable.
When we allow ourselves to believe in our stuckness, then our task shrinks to managing harm. We have to make the most of things within this system. Make tweaks, perhaps.
And overshadowed by crises, the left brain takes charge. We deal with each threat as it comes, leverage what we can, look for marginal gains within the rules of the game. We weigh option A against option B and act accordingly. And keep grinding on.
The homo economicus of the past gives way at last to homo certans — the striving human, forever chasing control, forever performing, unable to rest.
But, don’t we have a right brain too?
When the striving simply isn’t enough (and it never is), we seek solace in distraction. Impoverished in myths and meaning, and damned already by the vicissitudes of consumerism, we buy comfort in whatever packaged forms it comes. Our dystopia is one in which we have learned to play along.
So, what instead?
“Old yam has to rot in order that new yam can grow. Where is the earth? Who is going to do the planting?” — Ama Ata Aidoo
Can it be any other way?
I think we have to believe it can. We are caught between Ama Ata Aidoo’s call for planting and Arundhati Roy’s sense that something is already stirring. But there are things we need to (re)discover if this is to be more than wistfulness, and for imagination, hope, and strategy to converge. Here are two such things.
One: Nothing is the only way it could have been, and nothing about the future is settled. Maybe the current disorder in the world offers an opportunity. Maybe these are even the birth pangs of something different yearning to be born — and that something does not have to be a calamity.
Two: We are playful and creative beings, capable throughout our history of far more experimentation and reinvention than we may realise (try reading this). If we are able to reach inside and pay attention to our elemental yearnings, we might just find there the ingredients of different ways of being and doing — not only for ourselves but for the world.
We cannot wish away the crises overshadowing us. But we won’t deal with them unless we can imagine getting unstuck, and unless we can start describing the world we want instead. This task calls on us to think beyond the categories we have inherited, the institutions and processes we have created — and to begin weaving new stories about our flourishing.
Here we need not science and law, nor even politics and psychology, but story and memory and mythology. Amitav Ghosh and Julian Aguon are among those who have made the case for a new imagining in the context of climate, while a writer like Cole Arthur Riley leads us on a journey from fear and lament and rage through justice and repair to find rest and joy and liberation. These are the kinds of stories that set us on our way.
So, yes, we can become unstuck. But it will take far more than playing within the system. It calls for a bigger story. The time has come for poets and heretics, for prophets and sages.
The world we are becoming
This is the beginning of a project over the coming months (and years?) to think afresh about the world we are becoming.
It flows from two places, distinct but closely related.
The first is my twenty years of work (and striving) within the relentless endeavour of making the world a fairer and more just and equal and peaceful place, straddling human rights and adjacent sectors. This now takes the form of my strategy practice, but has previously taken me to countless places of trauma and power.
Increasingly, this work has revealed a desperate longing for fresh hope and inspiration, and for a joined-up way of articulating the world that we actually want, instead of a forlorn battle against the one we have.
The second is my experience of mental exhaustion a few years ago, often branded as burnout, which I wrote about here in a little effort to break the taboo.
This experience was by no means disconnected from that wider sectoral pathology. It has become viscerally clear to me that we cannot attend to the big picture without also paying close attention to the personal, nor the other way round. For, what is the state of the world if not the aggregation of the lives of billions and the way we experience ourselves and power and all that surrounds us?
The aim is that this project will eventually yield a book. I am pouring most of my time and energy into that. But in the meantime, this Substack is going to be a place for sharing ideas and an invitation to travel together. I’d love you to come along.