How to Fall in Love with the Future - A Biosphere Project Blog
- filipvk
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
Dear friends,
In my previous post, “Apocaloptimism,” I concluded with a reference to the work of Rob Hopkins, and I promised you an interview with this pioneer of the transition to a different and more beautiful world.
I’ll keep this introductory text brief: any attempt to summarize this delightful and fascinating conversation with Nate Hagens on his podcast “The Great Simplification” would do a disservice to the breadth and depth of this discussion, as well as the wisdom, strength, imagination, and humor it contains.
The core of the message is: we must fall in love with the future we want, rather than primarily fearing the future we don’t want.
But in order to fall in love with the future we do want, we must first be able to imagine it. If we have no image of it at all, it will be difficult to love it, let alone fall in love with it and long for it deeply. Because this is also about longing at scale. And that’s where the problem lies, because we’re no longer very good at imagining other possible futures—let alone longing for them.
We’re very good at coming up with dystopias: on Netflix, you can see the world come to an end in a hundred and one ways. But gentle, loving, holistic, and hopeful visions of the future? You’d have to search a long time to find them.
And we’re becoming more and more afraid—if we haven’t been for quite some time already: as the climate crisis and the convergence of other ecological crises become increasingly clear (and deadly), it’s easy to fall into despair or, conversely, even stronger denial. Both options lead to paralysis, so how can we still find a foundation for hope and agency, and muster the courage to roll up our sleeves? How can we still imagine a brighter future amid increasingly alarming news and calamities? How can we become or remain aware of the (very) bad news, yet still make room for hope, courage, and imagination?
Rob Hopkins is a co-founder of Transition Network, one of the first organizations to offer support and coaching to community initiatives focused on transition in areas such as energy, food, public transportation, urban agriculture, local currencies, resilience building, and so on and so forth.
But since Rob Hopkins stopped working for Transition Network, he has focused precisely on this: how can we help people imagine a different kind of future?
To that end, he has developed wonderful “exercises,” such as his “time travel project,” in which thousands of people have already participated and where participants are invited to imagine a different kind of future in all sorts of ways.Imagination and memory use the same part of the brain, so when we try to imagine a future, it’s as if we’re trying to remember it.
The exercises that Rob and his team have devised aren’t just a matter of mental concepts either: they’re all meant to be tactile, tangible, and to engage multiple senses. For example, participants build cardboard models of what they envision, or are asked to create “scent bouquets” to try to capture how they imagine the future will smell. And it should come as no surprise that for most people, these will be scents associated with nature: flowers, grass, trees, water. And no one imagines a future with bigger IKEA stores or even faster iPhones. No, what we all long for most turns out to be primarily about beauty, peace, and connection...
Research has shown that our capacity for imagination has been declining for decades—a finding that should come as no surprise. This is due to a variety of factors: naturally, the time we spend in front of screens; the drastically reduced opportunities for our children to play freely; and the sharply diminished time we spend in nature. But it’s also related to the way we assess and test knowledge in our education system—something I’ll come back to later.
The creativity with which Rob Hopkins devises these exercises cannot be separated from his training as an artist: Rob attended art school, and the creative skills developed there are now essential to him. There are indeed other great thinkers in the current transition who started out as artists, and that is surely no coincidence: they are less hindered by silo thinking, dogmas, and all manner of discipline-specific indoctrination, and are better able to think “out of the box.” This is why I believe that art—or rather, the freedom of spirit that can result from the artistic way of thinking, feeling, and imagining—will be able to play a major role in the coming transitions.
I, of course, fall into that category as well, and I believe that my life as a visual artist has left within me—for better or for worse—certain neural connections that lie quite far “outside the box,” something I am aware of but can no longer—nor do I wish to—hide.
The future will be “out of the box” or it will not be at all.
But this is yet another reason to cherish art education more than ever: we must not prepare our children to become cogs in the economic machine that is devouring our planet alive; we can teach them to think and feel freely, and to exercise their creativity as freely as possible, because if there’s one thing we’ll need to navigate the coming crisis and transition, it will surely be creativity, resourcefulness, and imagination! And a deep longing for a future we actually want.
About Transition Network: The initiative, which was founded in the small English town of Totnes, quickly became an international phenomenon and provided support to countless local transition initiatives worldwide. It is committed to that “in-between space” between government and individual citizens, which will be so important in the transition that lies ahead. As I’ve already written, and as Rob also says: “If we wait for the government, it will be too late, and what we do individually will not be enough; but if we do something together with the people around us, it might just be enough and just in time.”
Transition Network is therefore dedicated to supporting and facilitating exactly that: local initiatives that connect people and build resilience in the face of the food, energy, and climate emergencies.
In my essay “Let Us Not Talk About the Climate Crisis any Longer, Part Two” (specifically in Chapter Six, “From Below”), I had already mentioned this: the revolution will come from the bottom up, not from any national or international government. And Transition Network is one of countless initiatives worldwide that—largely under the radar of the mainstream media—are engaged in that quiet revolution and the groundwork for a different kind of world.
Rob is the author of several books, including “The Transition Handbook” and, more recently, “How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveler’s Guide to Changing the World.” He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Plymouth, has received two honorary doctorates, and has hosted 100 episodes of his podcast “From What If to What Next.”
His music project with artist Mr. Kit, “Field Recordings from the Future,” is now available and is being developed into a live show that will go on tour in 2026.
His website is robhopkins.net.
Finally, one more important note: Toward the end of the interview, Rob says that we must nurture a very strong longing for that possible future. Just a little desire isn’t enough; it has to be “a deep longing at the soul level,” in his words.
I found that an interesting observation. And you could argue that falling in love always has to do with the soul. So falling in love with the future, logically speaking, seems like a challenge for the soul, yes.
But one of the problems we run into is that our “civilization” no longer believes at all that we have a soul—or rather, that we are a soul. We think that falling in love is merely a matter of selfish genes, hormones, and survival strategies. And that’s a problem. We are the first “civilization” since the dawn of humanity that no longer believes in ourselves or the world being ‘ensouled’. So there’s work to be done there, too—and it’s quite “out of the box” as well. To be continued!
And let’s spend a little more time trying to imagine the future we want. What would that future look like for you? And what would it smell like?
Thanks for reading, and until the next episode,
All the best to you,
Filip
