From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

As the scholar Richard Sennett puts it, ‘Modern capitalism works by colonising people’s imagination of what is possible.’

Sarah Corbett and the Craftivist Collective. Corbett’s approach, of ‘gentle activism’, focuses on ‘anything that links craft with activism’. It is, as she told me, ‘about curiosity and about questioning’.

As Jay Griffiths, author of Kith, told me, commercial toys teach kids that there is a scarcity within them, that they are not able to provide their own imagination, to make the world otherwise. If a child is given a twig and a pile of leaves, they can transform them into absolutely anything. That’s imaginative power, and it’s a really important way

When we multitask, we overload the brain, and the processing shifts from the hippocampus, which enables us to remember and imagine, to the striatum, which is responsible for rote tasks.44 This makes it harder for us to learn a task or, after a period of multitasking, even to remember what we were doing.

‘Yes, and’ is fundamental to improvisation. When I asked Deborah Frances-White why, she told me that in life, saying no allows us to remain safe, whereas learning to say yes means learning to trust other people and to be open to being changed by the other person.

rebuilding of the collective imagination

One might say that human societies have two boundaries. One boundary is drawn by the requirements of the natural world and the other by the collective imagination. —SUSAN GRIFFIN, ‘To Love the Marigold’

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans became the most powerful creatures on the planet because of our imagination, our ability to tell stories and to ask ‘what if?’35 What if we revived that capability, in great abundance, starting now?

If we’re going to stand a chance of reclaiming our own attention, we have to really understand that our attention does have great value, to us, to our lives, to our well-being, to our collective future; it matters what we give our attention to.

‘The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention – the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress,’ Maggie Jackson writes in Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.