Expanding Our Future Visions

Close your eyes and picture yourself 20 years from now. Look around at the world of that future. What do you see? Environmental devastation, wildfire, species loss? Or a green, flourishing society in harmony with nature? Something in between??

If dystopian visions came to mind, how did you feel? Did you want to turn away, deny the potentiality of that future? Or did you feel motivated to change that trajectory?

A few weeks ago, I led a workshop on crafting future narratives, where we used Situation Lab 's "Thing from the Future" card game to prompt participants to imagine hypothetical things from a range of alternative futures, such as “In a wild future, there is a monument related to leisure. What is it?” The prompts ranged from green, optimistic, and silly to outright dystopian collapse.

In the debrief, the group with the dystopian cards shared how difficult it was to not put an optimistic spin on the prompt cards they’d been dealt. They didn’t want to accept a negative future.

Stretching Our Imaginations

In my experience leading hundreds of people through futures exercises, I’ve noticed that people tend towards one of three paths when prompted:

• An idealized, extremely hopeful (preferred) future;
• An extreme apocalyptic narrative (with mental images drawn from sci-fi);
• A future barely distinguishable from the present day.

But in order to stretch our imaginations to help us better prepare for the future, we need to train our brains to explore not just the opposite of where we naturally gravitate, but also the wide, multi-dimensional expanse of possible futures between and beyond those extremes.

Honoring The Pain of Difficult Futures

We understandably tend to avoid imagining negative futures, even when we know that facing them helps us prepare for worst-case scenarios. As Mary Martin has explained, “people don’t like being asked to investigate things that cause them discomfort.”

There is transformative power in allowing yourself to explore and sit with those dark possibilities.

Some friends and I have formed a podcast club to listen to and discuss the “We are the Great Turning” podcast with Jessica Serrante and Joanna Macy that teaches Joanna’s Work that Reconnects.?

Last week, we practiced one of these teachings - honoring our pain for the world. We felt, we expressed, and we shared the pain that comes from living in today’s world, witness to greed, hatred, and destruction ravaging people and the planet. We allowed ourselves to sit through the discomfort.

Instead of avoiding negative futures or forcing optimism, try sitting with what arises when considering negative futures. Honor those feelings as signs of the depth of your care, grief, or anger.?

Nurturing Visions of Positive Futures

“Dystopias can certainly tell us what we don’t want, but they don’t really help us to create a roadmap for what we can aspire to or can perceive.” -Frank W. Spencer IV

Just as there is value in facing negative futures, it’s equally important to stretch yourself to imagine positive futures. But it can be hard to envision a future you haven’t seen.

So if we want to work towards brighter futures, ones where we have succeeded in addressing climate change, injustice, systemic oppression, we need more images of inclusive, just, and regenerative futures.

To counter the constant barrage of dystopian images we see, we need to make an effort to expose ourselves to experiences and narratives that spark our imagination and nurture our visions of what could be.

Beyond the Utopia/Dystopia Binary

While exploring extreme scenarios has value - especially for those who have trouble conceptualizing a future that will be something different than today - dwelling in utopian perfection or utter dystopia can be problematic:

• The future will likely fall somewhere between the extremes, and will consist of multiple realities coexisting in tension. Bridget McKenzie calls this the "Possitopia."
• As futurist and speculative designer monika bielskyte writes, “Utopian Futures are generally envisaged as so “perfect” that they can only exist by prodigiously leapfrogging all of the most urgent inequities of the present.”
• Dystopias don’t help us imagine positively transformed futures. In fact, I wrote about in last week’s post, even perceived threats - including from imagined futures - can shut down our ability to think expansively.

In order to address the polycrisis we must stretch our thinking to consider a full range of possibilities, narratives, and solutions that can exist simultaneously. In future posts, we'll explore specific practices for expanding your imagination to create a wide range of future narratives.

For now, I invite you to tune your senses to beauty and possibility, and practice sitting with difficulty. Bonus if you do both at the same time.