on agency & what it gives us
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
there is something quite rebellious and empowering about using your own mind to create other realities.
Rodrigo Turra from The Nexialist • 🪈✨The Nexialist #0176
Affective Foresight begins with the acknowledgement that futures thinking benefits the human emotional state, seeks to understand emotional nuance of the future, and promotes the benefits of foresight as a tool for improved mental health and decision making
Seth T. Harrell • Affective Foresight
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more
Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays
people seem to be surprisingly bad at using their freedom to feel good, and especially at using it to feel deeply good.
Sarah Perry • Deep Laziness
Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
tomorrowing — an active mindset of anticipating challenges and opportunities rather than passively waiting for the future.
Sarah DaVanzo • Gen Z’s Curiosity Fingerprint for the Future
“Active Hope is about becoming active participants in bringing about what we hope for. Active Hope is a practice. It points us toward a way of life that enriches rather than depletes our world.”
Medium • Welcome to Terranascient Futures Studies & Foresight
What underpins them both is an enduring sense of agency: If you mentally view yourself as younger—if you believe you have a few pivots left—you still see yourself as useful; if you believe that aging itself is valuable, an added good, then you also see yourself as useful