When reality feels like a flaming dumpster, some may see utopian thinking and daydreaming as just escapism at best, or maladaptation at worst. Well, I happen to think it’s pretty essential, not as a coping mechanism, but as a rope to get out of this quicksand. Burying our heads in the doom and gloom has its appeal (I don’t mind engaging in incessant complaining to be very honest), but daring to dream of a world where billionaires pay taxes, Internet and real-life trolls don’t have a platform, and humans treat one another with decency can feel pretty nice, too. And if reality insists on being a mess, we might as well entertain ourselves with wildly optimistic delusions for a little while.
These are, after all, just some big-picture thoughts I keep having about the world we could have, one day…
I tend to envision society in these five buckets (governance, economy, culture, education, and innovation) for pretty arbitrary reasons. To me, the first three represent a triad of drivers that are indispensable for society. Governance is essential for leading the direction of society and for reinforcing order and stability for its people. Economy is essentially about resources. Any functioning society needs to find a way to circulate, distribute, and trade the value brought about by its systems and people. Culture is the collective patterns of how society behaves, influences, fossilizes over time.
I just have a soft spot for education; hence it’s there. Though education isn’t quite at the scale of influence as culture/economy/governance, it has now become such a fundamental aspect of childhood, which, in case you forget, everyone has to go through before they reach the point of access for many of the other buckets (at least in terms of influencing them). Education has a baked-in potential for inducing societal transformation in ways that even the most conscious and ambitious efforts in each of the other buckets can’t quite match. And lastly, by innovation, I mean all that ingenuity and problem-solving capacity that society has, across science, technology development, and research and discovery. It’s a quality almost intrinsic to the whole journey of humankind.
There’s so much more that I’m leaving out of the little graphic above, which in retrospect looks very awkward for how rigid and boxy it appears (I made this a while ago). The content itself is just some rough ideas I’ve noted down over time for all the things I wish were reality instead of whatever mess the world is living through. Rather than a coherent, concrete blueprint for so-called utopia, this graphic is an exercise for me to throw all the ideas out there, no matter how absurd and distant from reality they are. Engaging in this bit of delusional, utopian thinking is helpful for someone like myself to not lose hope as the world wakes up every day in a slightly too sinister time loop, and to fend off the monotony of everyday life and keep at trying to make things even just a teeny bit better.