On the Long Time Project community call, Phoebe Tickell introduced us to an exercise for speaking to our ancestors (no, it wasn’t an Ouija board). It was called “Inquiry from the Future” from the Moral Imaginations playbook. This exercise involves imagining a conversation with our future descendants 200 years from now and asking them about the world they live in. It’s a thought-provoking exercise that helps us reflect on our current actions and their potential impact on future generations.
A world that we’ve destroyed
If our descendants in 200 years looked back on us and asked us what it feels like to live in that every day with deep inequalities and destruction of our environment, a world that we’ve destroyed for them.
The words that came to mind were that we’re living in a careless society, both in the sense of not doing anything about something and living in a community without care. We live in a superficial society where we can pretend to be effecting change to tackle these issues to make ourselves feel better. Still, it’s all superficial if we were to think about it for a second. We live in a kleptomaniac society where we can’t stop setting fire to things around us like it’s an addiction, almost nihilistic.
A world that we’ve created
If our descendants in 200 years looked back on us and shared that their society is entirely of freedom and equality, a world that we’ve created…for them and asked us how we did it and what support we wished we had.
I feel that we would have woken up as a society to what I said above, that we’d have collectively, in different ways, a truth & reconciliation process about our past and our present that created the safe spaces, to be honest about the destruction we inflict collectively and the repair we need to do. But also, we would have unearthed the glimmers of hope and solidarity buried within us. These are the moments of collective action, the small but significant changes in our daily lives, and the growing awareness of our interconnectedness. These are the seeds of change that we need to help each other surface, to scratch beneath the surface of the default behaviours in how we consume, see success and treat each other, to how we feel and want to act. The analogy I would use is that we can do the deep work that washes away the pollution that prevents us from seeing the stars. I would ask our descendants what they’d love to create with us if we were here and what they’d love to start with their descendants.
Diverse spaces as governance
Participating in the breakouts made me realize the importance of collective accountability. When you create communities where people from different practices — designers, strategists, playwrights, and community organizers — come together, it naturally fosters curiosity about each other’s perspectives. This curiosity, in turn, leads to a shared responsibility for our actions and decisions.
