I've Been to the Future. It Worked Out.
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I've Been to the Future. It Worked Out.<br>Don't let fear be the only future you can imagine.
Iwana Johannsen<br>Jun 30, 2026
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My heart was sinking.
I was at the wedding of a close friend last weekend, where I probably knew 90% of the guests and ended up in countless conversations and catch-ups throughout the weekend. As you might expect, two topics seemed to find their way into almost every conversation currently: AI and work. Probably even more so with me, because once people ask me, “What do you do?”, it’s almost inevitable that we end up there.<br>It was one of the most beautiful weekends I’ve had in a long time. But returning to work afterwards left me reflecting on many of those conversations. Because they contained so much worry, fear, and uncertainty that they made my heart sink. The concerns ranged from, “I’m scared AI is going to extinguish us all,” to, “I know my field won’t exist much longer, but what am I supposed to do about it?” to, “If we don’t have work anymore, what will we even do all day?”<br>What struck me most was not the questions themselves because I’ve heard them all along. It was how little excitement accompanied them. I barely heard a word about possibility, opportunity, or positive imagination for the future.<br>As things go, I was sitting here trying to figure out how to continue this article when I stumbled across a YouTube conversation between Rob Hopkins and Nate Hagens. I was ready for lunch anyways and promptly took a two hour detour to listen to it. Thank you, serendipity.
A crisis of imagination.
Listening to Rob Hopkins, I was struck by his argument that we are facing a crisis of imagination. We seem remarkably good at imagining what could go wrong. Give us a new technology, a geopolitical conflict, or a societal challenge, and our minds quickly generate vivid scenarios of collapse, disruption, and catastrophe. But ask us to imagine a future that is meaningfully better than today, and many of us struggle.<br>Hopkins points to research suggesting that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for years. There are many possible reasons: the decline of free, unstructured play in childhood, the rise of screens, education systems increasingly focused on testing, and our growing separation from the natural world. Our culture reinforces that contraction. Turn on Netflix and humanity is wiped out by zombies, aliens, viruses, AI, or nuclear war. Browse the bestseller lists and you'll find no shortage of middle-aged white men writing about extinction and collapse. Turn on the news and it's crisis after crisis. The future is either business-as-usual or dystopia. We are immersed in narratives that exercise one side of our imagination while neglecting the other.<br>What I found particularly interesting was the connection between imagination and stress. Research suggests that imagination and memory rely on many of the same neural processes. Under chronic stress, anxiety, and uncertainty, our capacity to imagine the future begins to shrink. The future contracts. We become preoccupied with immediate threats rather than longer-term possibilities.<br>In a culture built around urgency, fear, and precariousness, that has profound implications. Because if our ability to imagine alternatives diminishes, so does our ability to create them.
A lack of positive imagination.
And perhaps that was exactly what I was hearing in those conversations at the wedding. A lack of positive imagination. People could clearly articulate what they were worried about. They could explain the risks of AI, the uncertainty of work, and the challenges ahead. What they couldn’t do was picture the after.<br>Ask someone what they’re afraid AI will take, and they’ll talk for twenty minutes. Ask them what they’d actually want work and life to look like on the other side, and you get a shrug. Silence. Maybe a slightly embarrassed “I haven’t really thought about it.” We’ve rehearsed the catastrophe so many times that it feels real, and left the better future as a blank we don’t quite trust ourselves to fill in.<br>That blank is the whole problem. Because, as Hopkins says, imagination is directly tied to agency. If the only future you can picture is one where work disappears and takes your income, identity and purpose with it, then of course you freeze. There’s nothing to move toward, only something to brace against. Maybe the biggest challenge is that we’ve forgotten how to see the possibilities.
But what if we asked a different question? What if AI works?
Not in the simplistic “technology will solve everything” sense. But what if AI genuinely makes large parts of today’s work unnecessary? What if it dramatically reduces the cost of creating, learning, building, coordinating, and solving problems?<br>What kind of society would we want on the other side of that? What would people do with an extra twenty hours a week?<br>How would we spend our time if productivity...