on better futures

claiming it's over is just an excuse to avoid building what's next.

Anderson • "Zihilism", and Why Young Men Are Choosing the Roulette Wheel

I want to defend and buoy hope – it’s a fragile, quirky thing, but it has the power to help us act in the face of finitude

Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain... See more

John Lysaker • Our days are both rough and slippery. Hope brings traction | Psyche Ideas

From mythmaking to legal treaties to weaving to movement building, what knits these various examples together is their avoidance of single solutions to complex problems, instead enabling a pursuit of multiple different actions and wider systemic changes with long term, positive transformations

Anab Jain • Radical Design for a World in Crisis

Bringing about the world we want to live in, the world we want to leave to our children is, substantially, the work of the imagination, or what educational reformer John Dewey describes as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’.18

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

Innovation in a caring society must not only generate profit but create better outcomes for everyone. This is possible, but it requires care for people and planet to be valued as highly as capital – and for wellbeing to be incentivised as much as shareholder return.

Rachel Coldicutt • Sunshine Machines: Towards a Feminist Future of Digital Care

And basically, my gripe is, we collectively generally treat every transition the way I used to treat “time for recess”: This is just going to happen, so let’s not focus on how it’s going to happen, or whether the getting there is hard. Let’s just get from here to there, OK? And then we can be there and forget about here.

Sophie Lucido Johnson from You Are Doing A Good Enough Job • It's Going to Take You Longer to Get to Work

At this moment, we are unequivocally confronted with the need to reimagine our humanity and what it means to be living organisms sharing the planet with many other organisms, some living, some not. This is nothing new.

However, at this moment, we can plainly see how black, brown, queer and disabled bodies are devalued; how people who threaten the

Stephanie Dinkins • Afro-Now-Ism

• post-tragic (meaning and agency on the other side of despair)

• post-extrinsic (driven by new societal purposes)

• post-rational (open to ways of knowing that transcend and include the intellect),

• post-exploitation (reflective about the uses and abuses of power)

• post-tribal (whole-hearted togetherness in a world of love and power; an expansive