on agency & what it gives us

Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.

Adaptation work builds agency. It counters the attitude of ‘There’s nothing I can do’/‘I’m too small to make a difference.’ This is because, unlike decarbonisation work, it is by definition focused, local, concrete and tangible. One then reaches the point of people being able to say to themselves something like this: ‘Our climate concern isn’t just

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

When people can feel something but cannot yet name it, it means the market is about to change. That’s what latent demand looks like, in both markets and culture. There is a mounting energy waiting to move, and we sense that energy before we even have the words for it.

And right now there is a growing latent demand for sovereignty.

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.

Most of us really have very little say in the diagnoses we get, even though we all carry a lot of self-knowledge about our bodies and minds. You see the impacts of this a lot when it comes to mental health and neurodivergence: people fighting for years for their autism or ADHD diagnosis, or trying to get an eating disorder diagnosis despite their