the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in first.”59 And yet, maybe before we can put the future we want into words, we have to say the wordless things first.

hard empathy can even help you feel more connected to your future self. If you keep extending your natural circle of empathy to strangers with unfamiliar lives, to people who seem very different from you, then even if your brain treats your future self like a stranger, or like someone you have nothing in common with, you will be more likely to care

Debrief with someone:

By imagining one way the future could be different in the same kind of physical environment as where the scenario takes place, you’ll be able to imagine and project the future right onto the real world around you.

if we follow our curiosity, we will usually arrive at a clearing: an open space where something new can exist, a place for us to start thinking about making a change that matters.

setting a timer and spending five minutes—and only five minutes!

You’ve learned to see in the dark. We often say the future is bright, as in full of reasons to be hopeful. But the future is also dark, as in unforeseeable, unknowable. And that’s a wonderful thing, because if we can’t know exactly what the future will be, then it can be anything. We can still change it, we can shape it, we can actively make it

The voice might say, “In a world that’s pretty much the same as today,” if you’re not trying to stretch your imagination very far.

They agreed the most significant rite of passage for teens of the future would be the first time you personally, directly experienced a devastating consequence of climate change.