What if the future is soft?
The seductive comfort of hopelessness and why to hope anyway.
Quick reminder: Registration for Women’s Circle 2025 closes February 28. Read this for more info.
I had another article all outlined, researched and typed out for this week, but between you and me, it was a real downer.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve read my fair share of real downer articles the past oh… 26 days or so.
Every time I open an app, after two minutes of scrolling I need a lie down.
I’m about at capacity for reading downer articles, so it didn’t feel right to publish one.
This is me standing at the podium dramatically ripping up all my notes and flinging them into the air. It’s all very exciting and very dead poets society of me.
Between Christmas and New Years this year, we booked a cabin in Montana. One morning on a long walk along some snowy country roads I listened to
’s interview on the On Being podcast. The episode was called On Radical Imagination.I liked it so much that when it ended I started it right over and listened all the way through again. I kept taking my glove off with my teeth to type out thoughts on my Notes App.
Brown says we are in need of radical imagination. Right now we are living in the product of someone else’s imagination.
That’s all capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy is—someone’s imagining turned group imagining turned action turned status quo.
So much of our lives is paying homage to someone else’s imaginings.
Lens also began her Substack this week with Adrienne Maree Brown:“We are in an imagination battle.
Author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown writes in her book Emergent Strategy:
‘Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.’” - Lyz
Another word for imagining a better world is hope.
I want to talk about hope today.
But what is there to hope for?
In 2022 we watched as reproductive rights were set back in time 50 years with the overturning of Roe V Wade.
In 2023 we watched the continued rise of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and others with millions of listeners asserting that women should be subjugated to men.
In 2024 we watched a rapist felon win the presidency against a competent, qualified woman. Again.
In 2025 the president is banning federal funding for any project trying to make our world a more fair place through diversity, equity or inclusion. Any grants that include the words “female,” “historically” or “male-dominated” are flagged.
Misogyny is running rampant in the manosphere, the broligarchy is taking over the world and Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned because too many women testified against him.
Whew.
It’s been… a lot.
Doom-scrolling and scrolling are basically synonyms in 2025.
I’ve had to put myself in a poetry time out where I’m not allowed to scroll in bed, only allowed to read poetry books1.
The poetry is providing a nice balance against the doom.
Still, 2025 has thus far been a uniquely shit-tastic year for hope.
So let’s zoom out.
Out past this year, out past this decade, this century, this millennium.
Some people blame patriarchy on The Code of Hamurabi or the book of Genesis, some on Plato. But really, if you’re going to blame anyone for the emergence of patriarchy, it wouldn’t be just one king or one set of laws since it popped up in so many different civilizations all over the world in all different time periods.
If we are going to blame anyone, it should be our common ancestor—Sahelanthropus tchadensis—a primate from 7 million years ago who changed history forever by walking upright.
After a few thousand years of walking upright, the female pelvis began to narrow.
In order for baby heads to fit through the narrowed birth canal, homo sapien babies (the descendants of Sahelanthropus tchadensis) started exiting the womb earlier.
While other primate babies need only a few months of mother’s care before independently caring for themselves, human babies require years of mother’s constant care and watch. A human baby can’t even hold its own head up for the first few months.
Also, there was no birth control pill, so most women were consumed with child care the majority of their fertile years. And life spans back then didn’t last much longer than the fertile window.
This left the men with much more time, energy and freedom to participate in public life than women.
Add in laws forbidding women from participating in public life and bada bing, bada boom— patriarchy.
Centuries and centuries of men ruling over women in government, religion, commerce and family life.
Now let’s zoom back into our time period in the US. Specifically 1972 when contraceptives were made legal for both married and single women alike.
Around this same time, laws were created that allowed women to be financially independent (getting a credit card and mortgage without a male co-signer, anti-discrimination laws for hiring and firing in the workplace, etc).
I think we so often forget just what a revolutionary age in history we are living in for women.
Set against centuries of women being dependent on men to be able to eat and have shelter, centuries of women’s sphere limited to the home, centuries of women being institutionalized, beaten or killed for speaking out, now women can legally be financially independent and they can choose when and if to have a child.2
Yes change is slow, but these aren’t just baby changes, these are MAMMOTH changes towards gender equality. Contraceptives are a GAME CHANGER. Financial independence is a GAME CHANGER.
It’s true many people in the US would like history to go backwards and take away contraceptives and make women financially dependent on men again, but these people are in the minority.
I’ve heard people say that half the country wants to take away women’s rights because half the country voted for Trump. But neither of those things are actually true.
According to polling data from 2024, three in four Americans believe that birth control should be easier to access. Only 5% believe it should be harder to access.
And while yes Trump won the popular vote (barely), only 63.9% of Americans voted at all, so really, only 31.8% of the country voted for Trump. And of those, not all of them believe that women’s rights should be taken away.
In a study by Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans (57%) believe that the country has not gone far enough in working towards gender equality. Only 10% thinks we’ve gone too far.
So yes, progress is very bumpy right now, but the picture isn’t as bleak as it’s often painted.
And honestly, given how drastically women’s rights have improved the past 60 years compared to centuries prior, OF COURSE there is pushback. There always is, but especially when the status quo changes as drastically as it has the past few decades.
Just think of what the expectations are for women in our lifetime when compared to that of our grandmother’s or our great-grandmother’s.
It starts in the home. And the home is changing.
Historian Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and The Blade, says that the shift from partnership societies (matrilineal/matrifocal) to dominator societies (patriarchy) in the Neolithic period started in the family.
It started with the subjugation of women in the home when men and women went from partners to dominator (husband) and dominated (wife).
She says that if we are to have another shift (and she thinks we will) from the dominator patriarchal society we currently live in to a partnership society, likewise, that shift will start in the home.
It will not be a top down movement, it will be a bottom up movement where women are no longer subjugated in the home. Where we shift from dominator/dominated into equal partners.
And that shift IS HAPPENING.
It is.
We could look at countless examples of things that would have been unheard of 70 years ago:
Before 1960, there had only been one female head of state leading a country. Since 1960 there have been 175 across 87 countries. The UN is made up of 46% women now.
Women now make up roughly half the labor force, and the majority of college graduates.
It is not at all uncommon to see fathers at parent/teacher conferences, volunteering in the classroom, pushing strollers, wearing baby carriers, etc.3
All unheard of 70 years ago.
The line of progress may be slower than we’d like, but it is moving upward.
The seductive comfort of hopelessness
We have lots of reasons to hope, but even if we didn’t, its so important we don’t slide into the seductive comfort of hopelessness:
If there is nothing to hope for, there is nothing to do.
Hopelessness is so seductive because it is so convenient.
Hope on the other hand is messy.
We must weather the possibility of things going well.
Whenever I need a hope fix, I listen to the On Being podcast with
. The environmental and social justice activists, scientists and spiritual leaders she interviews hope for a better world like it’s their job.It usually is their job.
In an episode called “What if we get this right?” Tippett interviews
, a marine biologist and climate change activist.In the episode Johnson reads a poem by Ayisha Siddiqa called On another panel about climate change they ask me to sell the future and all I’ve got is a love poem.
The first line is my favorite line:
“What if the future is soft…”
If anyone has reason to slip into hopelessness, it’s a marine biologist climate change expert. But Johnson stubbornly, unapologetically campaigns for hope.
The under-appreciated art of imagination
Johnson and Tippett discuss several pivotal figures in history who didn’t just visit the world of imagination, but relied on it, played in it. Lived it.
“What if the beloved community is already real and we have to live ‘as if’” - John Lewis
The beloved community didn’t yet exist, but John Lewis imagined it did.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge” - Albert Einstein
Traveling at the speed of light didn’t yet exist, but Albert Einstein pretended it did.
“What if we get this right?” - Ayana Johnson
Right relationship with our earth doesn’t yet exist, but Ayana Johnson pretends it does.
“I believe that all organizing is science fiction - that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” - Adrienne Maree Brown
Equality and freedom doesn’t yet exist for everyone, but Adrienne Maree Brown imagines it does.
“What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind?” - Ayisha Siddiqa
Kind revolution doesn’t always exist, but Ayisha Siddiqa imagines it does.
Gender equality and a partnership society doesn’t yet exist here, but what if we imagine it does?
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Currently inhaling Anne Carson’s poetry books. Highly recommend.
depending on what state you live in. sigh.
The queer community offers SO much hope. Our rigid gender binary has been in desperate need of loosening for so very long. The queer community is chipping away at the damaging imperative that we all obediently perform our gender correctly.
Two ideas that truly resonated with me: The Possibilities and Starting at Home.
In 2019 I wrote down as one of my goals, learn to cook two meals. In 2021, I listed 3 other meals and wanted to cook at least one dinner a week. This week my wife shared she was going to make pancakes for Valentines, my 6yo laughed and said “Papi is the one that knows how to make pancakes.” We all laughed and my wife and I did a fist pump in the back, a script had been rewritten.
There will continue to be misogyny in the world, but more households will continue to rewrite scripts.
This is why we WILL win out.
As horrendous as tfg's invasion of the Kennedy Center this week was, it's also a huge confession of his - and his entire cult's - achilles heel. A massive self-own. Because ultimately and without even knowing or admitting it to themselves, they want what only we have: true imaginativeness, true creativity, true desire, true love, true hope, true expression, truth itself.
Instead of cultivating those capabilities within themselves, and seeing that cultivation as the TRUE work of a human life (not accumulating increasingly unmeaning amounts of money), they think they can simultaneously steal and destroy those things.
Time for all of us with imaginations, creative lives, lives that seek to expand love, hope, and understanding - time for all of us to show them just how absolutely impossible that is.