When we think about the future, our minds turn almost effortlessly to bad things. Maybe it’s the climate problem, or the AI apocalypse, or political chaos — the list goes on and on.
Dystopianism has always been an easy game to play, and there’s something useful about imagining how badly things might go if we don’t deal with our issues now.
If imagining the worst-case scenario is a useful exercise, then imagining the best-case scenario must also be useful — and for the same reasons.
So why does this seem so much harder to do?
A new book by Kristen Ghodsee called Everyday Utopia offers some interesting answers. It’s a sweeping look at various communal experiments over the last two centuries and it makes the case that utopian thinking is both necessary and pragmatic. Beyond that, it’s a critique of our present society and the lack of care and connection that defines so much of it.
I invited Ghodsee onto The Gray Area to talk about what she learned from all these experiments and how we might apply those lessons today. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.
Sean Illing
A book about alternative ways of living is obviously animated in some way by a critique of the present order. How would you sum up that critique?
Kristen Ghodsee
This is very much a post-pandemic book. It was initially animated by a lot of the isolation and loneliness and general discombobulation that people felt during the pandemic and what we realized about our family structures. The hegemonic model in the United States is monogamous pairing, generally heterosexual, where we provide exclusive bi-parental care to our own biological offspring in a single-family home surrounded by hoards of our own privately owned stuff. That’s our…
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