All around me, I see people wanting to change their lives yet feeling trapped either by their environment or their own minds. There’s a lot of focus on how you as an individual can succeed. Whether it is the dream of having a big house, a stable job, fancy possessions, or quitting the job you find unfulfilling and start anew. Projecting into your future life and visualizing what you want often comes with putting yourself in the centre of everything. I find the wants and desires toxic. The world doesn’t revolve around one particular person. Every individual needs to be part of the world.
It’s only been one month into the new decade and we are once again brought back to realizing that the world is far from a perfect place. The 2020s does not come as a clean slate (nor does the imagined/predicted/depicted futures). We don’t get to leave everything behind and get a complete makeover through the potentially shame-inducing tradition of new year's resolution. It is time that we think about personal futures through the environment we exist in as a whole. Only through making sense of what’s happening around us and what the larger environment is evolving into, we find our better selves, work towards change, and ripple our impact into the world we are a part of.
Too many times we focus only on our own gains and forget about everything around us when it comes to self-improvement and self-care. We close ourselves in rather than open ourselves up. We tell ourselves that we are this unique person and we are special when we are not.
What Futures Thinking inspired me in the context of Personal Futures is that instead of “I want to be this person,” we can reframe this desire as “this is the environment I want to be a part of,” and “I am a part of this future.”
Over the past year, I’ve made some changes to my life. I have cut down alcohol consumption quite significantly, opted for more locally-sourced plant-based food whenever possible, started writing, and most recently started running again. It is not done by will-power but done by designing systems where I tie my worldviews and values with what I want to achieve. I found that I am thinking about the implications and consequences beyond myself. For example, rather than doing Dry January and bouncing back to regular 5 pm rituals as soon as February hits, I started embracing the social interactions I can influence through shaping activities based on other common grounds. I spend more time looking for interesting content and people to make my events worthwhile rather than attracting people with free food and free booze. While event organizers like hosting at a bar or a pub for convenience, I looked for alternative venues where people have a wider range of options to consume. I found out that most of the time, people just want to get together and share without feeling embarrassed. We are all a little bit insecure about certain things, and intoxication makes us feel a bit more shielded and less naked. I also learned that intentional embarrassment is a lot better than the intoxicated ones.
With that in mind, I no longer fear sober karaoke (and not hitting the high note like my 17-yo self) and public speaking. Getting handed the mic and the chance to stand in front of others is a privilege, and I want to be fully there, sober. At this point, it sounds like it is mostly about myself, but when I think back, I did it through making an effort to create spaces where we don’t expect “getting drinks” to be the default relaxation activity. It is not about me consuming less, it is about intentionally shifting the baseline towards meaningful and fully present social interactions where nobody in that space should feel embarrassed about being raw. In comparison to making this whole “drinking less” thing about one person and that one person only. It is far more effective to serve others with an environment where singing and not hitting the right note, dancing and looking hideous, speaking and stuttering, and having awkward conversations are totally fine without first downing a whole jug of beer or a few shots of hard liquor.
Next time you want to change an aspect of yourself, think about how to make it not just about yourself. Think about how you want the environment you exist within to be in the future and work your magic to create that environment in the next little while. You will change in the process, and you will find good company in the process.
Personal futures are heterotopic futures. Personal futures are awkwardly in between the less-than-ideal and the ideal. Personal futures are where we can experience change and the discomfort of change. Personal futures are communal futures. Personal futures are futures where we don’t have to work through challenges alone.
Download worksheet (ver.1):
I used this worksheet to facilitate the “New Decade, New Me” collage/zine-making workshop at Speculative Futures Ottawa. With references to well-know frameworks, I have simplified the concepts to make it more accessible to people who aren’t in the academic or professional futures realm.
Many thanks to Ben, Adam, Doc, Miguel, Janko, Santini, Gabriel … folks of the Speculative Futures community who shared their versions of approaching this topic and inspired me to come up with my own rendition through our past conversations.
