The Utopia Project

I grew up in the 1990s, a time of amazing optimism. The Berlin Wall came down, the internet arrived and the stock market boomed — history was over and anything was possible. I doubt I realised any of this at the time, but I’m sure it rubbed off on me. So maybe this explains the frustration that I, and so many others from my generation, feel. Anything was possible, and then the future happened.

The dot-com bubble burst, September 11th happened and the economy barely survived the 2008 crisis. We graduated university and struggled to find work, to find housing we could afford and to find any sense of belonging or agency in society. There were marches against austerity and cuts were made; there were marches to prevent wars which were fought.

And like every generation before ours, we’ve still had to come to terms with adulthood. Long commutes on hot and crowded trains, hours spent sitting in queues of traffic, worrying about how to get a house, how to pay the mortgage, whether our jobs will survive the next round of cuts, whether the next start-up will disrupt the industry we work in, whether we can get a doctors appointment in the next month.

Where’s the upside, the promise of the 1990s? Peering through that fug, it is true that for some of us, including myself, our world is amazing. Compared to most of the world’s 7 billion people, compared to the grand sweep of history, we have it easy — 8 hour days, 5 day work weeks at a computer — not breaking our backs in a field — the NHS, cheap food and cheap foreign holidays have all changed our lives beyond measure.

And for the billions of people who aren’t lucky enough to live in the west, there’s plenty of statistics to suggest that things are getting better. Hans Rosling, amongst others, makes a convincing case.

But just because things are getting better, and just because we have it relatively easy, doesn’t mean the problems we face on a daily basis should be ignored as trivial, or that we should close our eyes to the struggles and suffering of others. For those of us who grew up in the 1990s, we still remember that sense of optimism, that deep seated belief that anything is possible, and it feels like the world can and should be better.

I’m not the only person to think this. Countless politicians, NGOs and lobbyists vie for our attention with suggestions for tackling one issue or another — tweak the top-rate of tax here, an extra million to help with early-years education there — but where’s the vision? What direction are we travelling in? If we cut poverty — a noble cause — is it just so we can have more people sitting in traffic jams, to create a larger class of consumers so we can increase GDP, or could we be striving for something greater?

So that’s the point of this little project of mine, of The Utopia Project: to explore what that something greater might be, what a better world could look like and to figure out how we get there.