Imagine a normal day in the future. What kind of house would you want to wake up in? Who would you want to be living with? How would you like to get to work? What would you like to do when you get there? And later in the day, when you’re back at home, what do you want to do with your free time?
The picture you’re now imagining is your cosy future.
So often our discussions on the future focus on extremes. Tech billionaires and “utopians” talk about sci-fi scenarios with flying cars and cities on Mars. At the same time, dystopian voices tell us of the world’s end, whether through climate change, global conflict, or a rise of the robots.
Whilst the first perspective is entirely disconnected from the challenges we are actually facing in our lives, the dystopians struggle to spark hope and creativity in imagining an alternative world.
Rarely do we spend much time discussing how we want “normal” life to look in the future. But whilst it is not as flashy, this cosy future is much more relevant to the average human today. The idea with cosy futures is to imagine how we want to live our lives tomorrow. Things like housing, work, transport, social life, and other daily activities, play a major role in shaping how happy our lives are.
By imagining how we want our ideal normal days to look, we can set a clear destination to work towards today.
At the same time, imagining our cosy future can make us appreciate what we have in the present more as well. Maybe you are not doing your dream job yet, but you’re really happy with the friends you have around you, you’re in great health, or live in a place you can call home. Often, there is already a lot of beauty in our lives today that we may take for granted.
By thinking about the future on a human level, we can more directly see what is good in the world around us, and what we still need to change.
Cosy Futures are not just about the individual
And imagining cosy futures is also not only about the micro scale whilst ignoring all the bigger challenges in the world, like climate change or war and genocide.
If you were to ask a person from each country across the globe what their cosy future looks like, few would say that it includes bombs raining on their heads, flooding and droughts, or other consequences of climate change, like unstable food supplies. Ultimately, to enable cosy futures for all, we need to find inclusive systemic solutions to these complex questions.
Cosy futures implicitly rely on resolving these major challenges, and that’s important to remember. Our future goals should be oriented towards maximising human flourishing. But, that’s not possible if we’re on a dying planet, or if access to our basic human necessities is only available to a privileged few.
Technological and material development also play a role in our cosy futures – If your wish is that your family lives in good health, in practice that relies on the material realities shaped by our medical technologies.
For example, new medical innovations that allow us to detect lung cancer more quickly, can turn it from a deadly condition to an inconvenience. Or implementing new labour laws that make working manual jobs safer can also allow blue collar workers to live longer and healthier lives.
Exploring our role in change
For systemic crises, large-level solutions are inevitably necessary. But, at the same time, our local environment and daily routines also play a massive role in how stress-free and happy our lives are.
By comparing our cosy futures to the lives we lead today, we can see where the biggest improvements are needed. Perhaps it’s a dangerous road on your way to school that makes your commute a headache every day. Or maybe instead of the presence of a nuisance, it’s the absence of something positive, like inclusive cultural events in your area, or a safe green space to exercise in.
These things may seem mundane and unimportant when compared to major crises, but they nonetheless have a direct impact on our quality of life.
Importantly, unlike for systemic crises, we may be able to play a more direct role in solving these local issues. For chances are, if you’re stressed or feeling the lack of something in your daily life, there are people around you who share this feeling and a desire to change things.
And there are many stories from around the world from citizens like ourselves who took charge and organised politically, launched their own initiatives, or started building the world they wanted to see.
By imagining our cosy futures, we of course are forced to engage with the major challenges around us, much bigger than ourselves. But, it also serves as a reminder that we, and communities around us, actually play a massive role in shaping how our lives look, and how we can make the best of what we’ve got.
When many people the world over start remembering this collective power we hold, things may start looking different on a systemic level too.
Our point in time
Our cosy futures are the clock face, where we point at the time we want to live in. Under the surface, there are uncountable moving parts that work to make that change a reality.
And already today, compared to 50, 100 years ago, these moving parts have advance human development and quality of life globally.
Imagining cosy futures allows us to rediscover our place in time, our position in this evolution of human civilisation. Many good things today are the result of hard work done before us, which leaves space for the changes still to be made.
With our cosy futures in mind, we create a pole star towards which to orient our collective efforts. In today’s period of instability, it gives us a worthy goal to fight for, which is much more inspiring and constructive than an enemy to fight against.
And ultimately, it may also be a subtle reminder that there is already quite a lot of good, many seeds of hope, in our lives today.
