This week I’ve been getting sustainable news blasts with the subject title: A message from a livable future.
They come from New York Communities for Change, who do good work (unless there’s a scandal I’ve missed, which…there often is). Their decade-old Livable New York bill helped transition older buildings off fossil fuels, while building clean affordable housing — with the tax money of rich New Yorkers. They support union jobs in clean energy, including opportunities for people fresh-out-of-prison, and immigrants without stable papers.
I’m still on the email list even though I’m across the ocean. I’ve lived in six cities as an adult: Seattle, Chicago, New York, Tampa (barely), Taipei (a summer), and Amsterdam. As my geography has shifted, I’ve kept my name on various chains to stay tapped in. I want to absorb the bills, initiatives, protests, fundraisers, and even corny-vague-PR-emails from collectives scratching the surface of Things Getting Better.
You know what would make Things Better in my life? If you subscribed, you can do it for free!
When I think about the future I don’t imagine endless hellfire and water wars. I also don’t imagine a green rich utopia where everyone is living in solar-powered unison. This isn’t because neither are possible, or more realistically, because those realities don’t simultaneously exist in a violently stratified world.
The reason I can’t rub my crystal ball to reveal one polarized prediction is because I’ve never had a clear image of the future. The future is a flashing glint of images, like a hazy childhood memory you’re piecing back together Memento style. It’s the glow of orange distorted light encircling an aura photo, simultaneously funeral-like while possessing a magic that makes you believe the Aura Reader DOES have a connection to the divine (and not just a Polaroid and earrings-so-cool you’d drink poison out of their acrylic nails).
Because of my abstracted relationship to the future, I plan my life a few months at a time and let the rest roll out in front of me. However, COVID-19, and now my pending immigration status (a generous framing) have exacerbated this to an extreme. My ability to even map out a full month ahead has been gutted.
So, after reading one of the messages from a livable future, I opened TikTok to fill my brain with mindless slop. I wanted to ignore my nagging questions about my concept of future. Do I believe in one? Do I fear it? Am I doing enough for my own — or the future of others? Is that even possible under the homicidal thumb of capitalism?
The first video was from Sharon Van Etten, the earth angel musician I love (I made a TikTok about how nice she was when I catered for bands at Sasquatch music festival and she sweetly responded). She was commemorating the 10-year anniversary of her fourth studio album Are We There.
Her post inspired me to jump right into the album. Listening to Are We There on repeat airdropped me into my final train ride from Chicago to New York as a 24-year-old. I had all my belongings stuffed in two bags on an Amtrak, and that intractable feeling of being in your mid 20s, when time stretches out before you like a red carpet. At that age you can live in The Future a bit more, because it feels guaranteed through sheer statistics. There’s an invisible security blanket in everyone agreeing you have your whole life ahead of you, even when you angstily disagree.
Still, even then, my sense of future was a fragmented cloud of question marks. I’d been sleeping in a friend’s closet for weeks after my apartment was broken into multiple times by a man who robbed me in my sleep, and luckily, didn’t get violent. I’d burned bridges with a fraction of the Chicago comedy scene by getting drunk and Naming Names of rapey men, I’d been forced out of college for the second time for financial reasons after accruing more debt, and I knew the cafe I was working out was ultimately doomed — because as manager, I fielded calls and visits from angry vendors vying for overdue checks. I was just relieved to land on my sister’s couch in Brooklyn. Stretching the tape between then and now, there’s no way I could’ve predicted the next decade. Things are both infinitely better and worse depending on how you slice and serve it up.
Describing the horrors of COVID, or dead friends, choked out creative industries, and a live-streamed genocide to my past self would’ve rightfully inspired despair.
But also, describing 9.0 earthquake levels of romantic love, a decade of friendships lighting up new brain pathways, or the addictive magic of tapping into new creative scenes — this would’ve floored me in other ways.
The concept of “five year plans” came up recently with friend, and he shrugged and said “we’ll all be dead in five years.”
I responded, “Hey man, not cool, not ALL OF US WILL BE DEAD! You might live a long, horrible life.”
I think the gift of not having an extreme predictions is I don’t exclusively see a helpless descent into existential hellfire, and I also don’t have the gripping illusion of control that plagues people who track every sleep cycle on their AppleWatch (I’ll forever be a hater on my Android).
This isn’t to say I don’t dabble in both doomerism and a toxic hustle-mentality (both of which toss me into a pit of numbed-out burnout). I do! I just resent the current binary that you’re a naive idiot if you don’t succumb to Helpless Doomerism, OR you’re a self-fulfilling failhard if you don’t Plan And Hustle your life into a shape that’s often unreachable. The future is a weird lump of claymation, we both do and don’t have power to shape! That duality fuels and deflates me, like one of those sh*tty air mattresses that annihilates your back when your friend is graciously hosting you.
When I wipe my eyes from ugly-crying to my fifth replay of Sharon Van Etten’s Afraid of Nothing, and DO try to imagine a future, I get glints from the past, that feel like roadside billboards promising more road to ride. However foggy it might look.
When I think of the future, one that I can hold onto, I trace the branches back to the people building brick out of straw. I think of old friends— artists and activists on the south side of Chicago, who learned hydroponics and built a giant farm to feed the neighborhood. I remember the info dumps after wine-fueled art walks, describing how plant life can be so much more adaptable than humans. How watching nature generate itself feels like a stop-action animation in real life, how the soil is collaborative when we let it be.
I think of the older Jewish lawyer from the Upper Eastside I used to see at the volunteer immigration clinic. She’d come in with piping hot coffee, give free legal advice, and toss around jokes to lighten the mood. During one session, I debriefed her on the paperwork of a woman fleeing gang violence in Honduras. The woman - a mom and student, was part of an Indigenous Garifuna environmental activist family. Local gangs (supported by police) wanted to seize their land for profit, so she fled to the US.
During the next meeting, when both the mom and lawyer were present, the women hugged for minutes. The lawyer lost family in the Holocaust, and couldn’t listen to stories of Ice Detention Centers without feeling familiar pangs of horror. When the student was granted asylum and a work visa, they went out to dinner to celebrate, months later — they’d built a friendship outside the clinic.
When I squint forward, I think of the sisters who gave out seeds at the Bushwick community garden. I think of the man who handed out fresh tamales to people sleeping on the street, or, in his words “anyone having a sh*tty day.”
I remember the teacher in Seattle who cried when a classmate read a poem, not because it was that good, but because — in her words, she felt “a surge of young energy that reminded her why she does this.”
When I rattle my brain to think of the future, I just get these glints, looping the past to the present until the circle has an opening. The flicker of forward motion always lies in the faces of the people cursing their alarms and getting up every morning.
I think of the friends, who only months after meeting me brought back small Christmas gifts from other countries: paprika, coffee, hilarious paper dolls.
I think of the students, professors, and fired up activists gathering at a squat punk bar in Amsterdam to share medical supplies after the third encampment was torn down. The deliveries of bandages, and soup, and sharpies, the righteous anger and the transmutation of indescribable grief into pointed action.
I think of the Palestinian man who came up to me after a (practically empty) show last week to give me a hug because I wore a keffiyeh. When describing his personal survival philosophy since coming to the Netherlands, he quoted the Rafeef Ziadah poem: “We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.” He told me about his sister’s work in journalism, his job building/designing airports, and how he feels insane watching white colleagues complain about rainy bike treks to Albert Heijn while he’s holding his breath for his homeland. I think about how he told me he’ll continue to teach life because he’d be a “bastard” to squander it. I think, f*ck — what excuse do the rest of us have?
When I imagine the future, I see the Appalachian climate scientist who tirelessly promotes the progress that is being made, the projects people can get involved in — initiatives they can push locally. I watch her lock her account against trolls, I send her messages of support in hopes she’ll see them in between Conservative chuds.
When I think of the future, I also think of you becoming a free or paid subscriber!
When I think of the future, I remember the trans woman I met at an Amsterdam queer bar who joked about leaving Russia because she’s legally a “terrorist” there. I remember how we both laughed — because it’s funny, not in a “ha ha” way, but in an “are you f*cking kidding me?! These assholes are such losers.” I think about the casual defiance of singing karaoke right after that heavy reveal, of the radical futurism it takes to even transition in this hostile world.
When I think of the future, I see the birds nesting in a rain storm, making more tiny flying dinosaur freak babies for all of us to gawk at when we go on our existential walks. I think of my parasocial relationship with the crow, and how a year ago the idea of a crow “friend” was just a gothic fantasy.
When I think of the future, I wonder what delightful weirdos I still haven’t met yet, who is out there fashioning a garden meal for their turtle? Who is out there lighting a fire to a bank? Who is out there creating a psychotic piece of art that’ll resonate in a gutteral way?
When I think of the future, I don’t map it through external accolades or wedding bells or a tombstone, I see it in the glimmers of people also shaking their fists at the flaming hot sky. And I think, damn, maybe we could roast some marshmallows?
