on agency & what it gives us

Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,

Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Often, hope works best alongside tools for proactively tackling future challenges. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise and act upon that imagination, then that’s powerful, and for me, this is a slow form of critical activism.

Anab Jain • Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics

This is also a form of abolition—how do we figure out how to let people be free by prioritizing their needs and getting clear about what is going to make someone feel safe in a space?

Alexis Aceves Garcia • What if care is the work?

hope is by no means a universal feeling. One recent study found about one-third of young adults describe themselves as encouraged about the future, but 60 percent are “very worried.”

Maddy Lauria • Hope is not passive: How activism keeps optimism alive

A regulated woman pauses and gets curious. She stops absorbing what does not belong to her. That pivot is often misread as disengagement, even though it represents the return of agency.

Substack • The Workplace Runs on Dysregulated Women

Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors

Anna Wiener • The Age of Chat

The future depicted here is one where European citizens reclaim agency through introspection. As prevailing narratives of perpetual economic growth and technological fixes falter, more and more individuals believe that changing the world begins with personal transformation.

INWARDS - N O R M A L S

agency through introspection at a community level — what does this narrative look like through a post-individual lens, but still leveraging introspection and inside-out thinking

Considering that the main objective of foresight is to decrease the element of future surprise by increasing anticipation, the use of foresight mitigates and therefore reduces the anxiety experienced caused by uncertainty. In other words, the use of foresight leads to better impulse control, learning, and decision making.