possibility studies

I’ve found a strikingly similar pattern among political leaders, academics, NGO workers, businesspeople and young high-fliers, and not just in Europe and North America. Young people that I met in Africa were generally quite optimistic, but here too, despite burgeoning science-fiction scenes, dynamic hubs of digital innovation and lively political

Thanks to digital technology, we can all become film directors, musicians and game-makers. Mass creativity is possible as never before. But this isn’t quite the imaginative golden age it should be. Instead, powerful forces seem to be stunting creativity and promoting conformism, complacency, institutional inertia and a fear of being too different.

Sometimes hope itself feels like magical thinking. And maybe magical thinking is precisely what has sustained us

On balance, we should always choose hope over fear. We may be wrong, but at least hope is productive (and there are worse things in life than disappointment).

As stated by Glăveanu (2022) in his Manifesto, “[t]he possible re-emerges as an organizing category in our lives and our thinking not despite but because of living through the seemingly impossible and unimaginable.” The possible, transitions, temporalities, and the pluriverse appear as part of the same complex process of civilizational transition.

Real possibility, however, is a potentiality that is live precisely because it is rooted in the material here and now (unlike either faux or formal possibilities). Importantly, real possibility can open onto the past just as much as onto the future. The present has the potential to be curiously disrupted along both its edges: the “forward-dawning”

the possible and the actual are intertwined if we consider them temporally – they continuously feed into and transform each other through the course of action.

Experiences of the possible transform the self . The fact that humans can pretend things are not what they are, reimagine the past, envision multiple futures and conceive the impossible, are all transformative experiences.