I feel hesitant to write about the future here, as though imagining the future is the same as predicting. It isn’t, of course, but the stakes feel just as high. After reading authors scholars like Flusser, McLuhan, Benjamin, it’s hard to believe that the future, our present, hasn’t been manifested—spoken or written into existence. I know that this present is a distorted version of past imaginations; similarly, I know that in more complicated and less direct ways, writing, art, and futures do feed each other.

I think of hope-the-decomposer. I think of future-making work, care-taking work, archival work. I am afraid to look forward and cause harm. I believe in the future religiously, though it is a small thing in my cupped palm, though it barrels into me, enormous, and knocks me to the ground.

Somatically, survival and hope—not the immediate kind, but rather the imaginative kind, the expansive kind, and the kind that requires patience, and experimentation, and resilience—feel so diametrically opposed. Psychologically, they are.

Simplistically speaking, chronic stress (along with trauma flashbacks and intense grief) shut down the brain’s prefrontal cortex, causing us to progressively lose access to essential skills for future-making and solidarity-building: perspective-taking, focus, self-regulation, impulse control, and empathy. The neurons are knit together, much like mycelium, and lack of use causes the weakening of certain connections, called pruning.

When I think of writing, thinking, or dreaming about the future, I feel like clamming up, curling in on myself. I think of my mother, who was incredibly skilled at the immediate, survival kind of hope. She instilled in us a hope-parasite attached to discipline. The emotional and psychological survival skills she taught me without realizing—the very same ones I spent so long unlearning in therapy, in relationships throughout my adult life—have become eerily relevant in the current United States.

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