Widen what is possible

It is increasingly difficult for us to imagine the future. And even more so, I would say that it is difficult for us to imagine a future different from the present. A present in which we increasingly feel the circle tightening, we increasingly feel more pressure on our lives, we increasingly feel more discouragement seeing the drift of the world, and we even feel fear seeing this decline that at times we could even say seems like the decline of modern humanity, not only in its construction, but also in the human values that have built it or destroyed it, rather. Thus, the present seems to swallow the possible futures that would be desirable and it is hard for us to imagine futures that could be better. Uncertainty, fear, weariness, and reality itself bring us closer to imagining the catastrophes that are to come than to thinking about possible and viable exits if society were organized on other foundations and, above all, on other relationships with everything that is alive. Mark Fisher called this collective inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism “capitalist realism” (or “cancelled future”). As if, despite all the crises that are accumulating, there were no other possible way to live. As if we had no escape and resilience had become synonymous with enduring the unbearable.

And this growing difficulty is explained by many reasons. By some of those I have already exposed, but also by how our desires have been shaped. We thought we were clear about what it meant to have ‘success’, to enjoy, and to live well. And it is clear that all this depends on your life and cultural context and that it is crossed by many differences of class, origin, and gender, but it leads us to normalize situations of exploitation, and to small (or large) self-deceptions to make them bearable, which end up normalizing, and even legitimizing, inequalities, injustices, racism, ecological devastation, plunder, discrimination, and even wars or genocides. To this, or to a contained rage and frustration that one day will make us explode collectively or implode individually. And when we speak of transforming this model, the narrative often remains trapped in the words ‘sacrifice’, ‘renunciation’, ‘effort’, and ‘limits’ or, even, ‘impossibility’.

That is why we need a huge effort, one that is very necessary and decisive right now. We must focus our gaze, our desire, and our thought not only on warning about the future we might lose (and which, in fact, we are already losing): we need to desire the future we want to live in, and therefore, it is the time for cultural, political, and emotional dispute over what we understand by living well, and to understand what decisions are necessary today to act as a lever towards this common and desirable beacon. This is what this week's podcast we recorded with our colleagues from the Rezero Foundation has been about, and it also connects with the content of the conference 'Present decisions, future impacts: the rights of future generations in the legal, political and social spheres' organized in Barcelona by the Alliance for Future Generations, which I was also able to attend.

We want to build our own future and not just be spectators of the dynamics that devour it, that cancel it. We want to and we know what we need to make it possible and which mechanisms, tools, and values—legal, political, and social—must be disputed to achieve it. But we must be clear that the future we are talking about does not start from the known present, nor from the intent to guarantee in perpetuity a supposed well-being built on the exploitation of people and territories in a civilization that is collapsing ecologically. It is about building collective conditions so that other ways of living may be possible and desirable, and disputing this possibility: mutual support networks, cooperatives, the social and solidarity economy, housing struggles, encampments, care practices, and the dynamics and articulations to defend the territory, the collective organization to make a general strike possible for an issue as vital as access to housing. All of these are, without a doubt, the cracks through which the light of a possible and desirable future can enter again. They do not offer a single recipe, but they allow us to experience different relationships and broaden what we consider possible today.