We need more utopias

Why hopeful visions bring us toward the communities and lives we want and need.

Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash

Thinking about the future lately without spiralling into panic feels harder to do than ever. Whether it’s the environment, politics, the cost of living, the loneliness epidemic, or the increasing polarization in our values and beliefs, it often feels like everything is getting worse. Hope seems harder than ever to come by.

While I’ve felt a lot of despair the past few weeks, I’ve also encountered a lot of talk about hope. Earlier this week, while reading Deborah Levy’s divorce memoir The Cost of Living for my book club, I came across this quote: “life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.”

I recently listened to a podcast interview with the environmental activist Joanna Macy, hoping I might learn how to address the loss of hope I’ve been feeling in relation to climate change. Macy shared that noticing a loss of hope among the scientists she worked with more than 50 years ago was in part what motivated her to develop The Work that Reconnects, a program that brings people together to channel their eco-grief toward political action. A big part of her work involves turning people toward what she calls Active Hope:

Active Hope involves identifying the outcomes we hope for and then playing an active role in bringing them about. We don’t wait until we are sure of success. We don’t limit our choices to the outcomes that seem likely. Instead, we focus on what we truly, deeply long for, and then we proceed to take determined steps in that direction.

So we need both hope and positive visions of the future to make our lives tolerable. But we also know that our hopes unravel with astonishing frequency – whether for a loving marriage, well-adjusted children, arguments that end in repair, friends who show up when we need them, or communities that surround us with care. People disappoint us, and then we disappoint ourselves. Our dreams often don’t materialize – whether due to our own shortcomings, those of others, structural barriers, or just the whims of fate.

Beyond our own individual futures, those of humanity’s seem even more grim. Tech companies offer visions of the future where AI destroys humanity – or just takes all our jobs. Sci-Fi paints vividly apocalyptic scenarios – zombie takeovers, out of control pandemics, annihilation by asteroid, or environmental collapse.

But where are the utopian visions of the future where things go right? I attended a workshop this year where we spent the day discussing difficult topics. By the end of the day, the speaker wanted to end on a hopeful note. He walked us through a simple visualization exercise where we were to imagine ourselves five years from now. Walking through a garden courtyard, someone meets you and gives you a message on a piece of paper. What does it say? Going beyond the courtyard into your home, who is there and what you doing? I was surprised at how easily I was able to summon a future I wanted to inhabit – one where I was writing for a living, surrounded by loving presence. The image felt so real – and it appeared somewhat attainable, now that I had conjured it.

Having hopeful futures to move towards is important if we don’t want to end up going in circles, unsure of where we are headed, both in our personal lives and as a society. As Kristin Ghodsee puts it in her book Everyday Utopia, “without social dreaming, progress becomes impossible.” And yet, she continues, “resistance to new ways of thinking may be most extreme when it concerns how we structure our private lives” – where and how we live, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, or the quality of connections to friends, families and partners.

Imagining new futures often means rethinking what a good life looks like – looking at the various ways social life, education, and support networks have been structured differently in other places and throughout history. Ghodsee’s book provides a good overview of social experiments past and present.

But sometimes what we want doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes it needs to be conjured from the ether. Often this requires a vision. As Donella Meadows describes it: “A vision articulates a future that someone deeply wants, and does it so clearly and compellingly that it summons the energy, agreement, sympathy, political will, creativity, resources, or whatever to make that vision happen.” Often creating utopia also requires political engagement. In Quebec, for example, many municipalities still require the size of a home to be above 1000 square feet. Someone who has dreamed up a community of tiny homes might first need to attend monthly municipal meetings to advocate for changes to zoning regulations before their dream has a chance of being actualized.

Photo by Rach Pradhan on Unsplash

And this is where many utopian dreamers give up. “Planning meetings? How boring. I don’t have the time for that. I just want to do my thing. I guess it would be easier just to…” and we trudge back to the status quo, because it requires little friction, little effort. It’s just so much…easier.

But choosing to do things differently isn’t easy. It takes planning, working with others, a lot of time, and often difficult discussions. Building an intentional community or buying a duplex with friends sounds fun in theory but tends to be complicated in practice. How do you resolve conflicts when they inevitably arise? How do you handle it when someone wants or needs to move out? Doing things in community often implies more time, more friction, less privacy, and more communication than doing things alone.

It’s important to not let the messiness of reality get in the way of change. We should measure our success in the distance we move away from an ill-fitting past and toward a new future, however imperfect. We may never find the perfect partner or friend, the perfect intentional community, the perfect job, the perfect politics, the perfect way to re-engineer the economy to meet people’s needs. But to move away from ideas, paradigms, people, and situations that don’t serve us anymore we need to hang on tightly to the hope that something better is possible.

I’ll close with a quote from American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, one that appears on a coffee mug in my cupboard: “To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”