Saving the World

World salvation began centuries ago. One might argue that world destruction also began centuries ago, and that the two forces have forever been competing for human hearts and minds.

Philosophers, mystics, and scholars have reflected upon the human condition and shared their insights and wisdom through teachings, stories, art, and religion from ancient times to present. Fundamental truths about human experience have been repeated, retold, rewritten, studied, modernized, and made into books, movies, courses, and quotes that are so woven into culture that many of us take them for granted. There have always been individuals who leveraged these truths for personal awakening, and some of those people have changed the world and evolved collective understanding in transformational ways.

But the darker forces of human nature are undeniable, and they have been indulged through cultural and political systems that have allowed them to grow out of control. These forces have successfully appealed to people’s natural desires for dominance and comfort. Comfort is relative, and people can grow comfortable with their circumstances even when they are not ideal. There is comfort in what is familiar.

The first key to saving the world was awakening – defined as “an arousal from what is like sleep, or a revival of interest in, or attention to, what has been neglected”. What had been neglected was now an existential threat to humanity. The earth had been neglected. Human rights had been neglected. Civility had been neglected. The problems that flowed from all of this felt insurmountable as the world faced ecological devastation, wars, and political upheaval across the globe. The world required a critical mass of awakened humans to save it.

In 2024, I was at a turning point in my decades-long quest for personal awakening. For me, a key to unlocking that awakening was when I stopped drinking alcohol. Alcohol was the way I numbed the pain of my human existence. What I realized as I awoke from my slumber was how many other people are also numbing their pain, and how many ways there are to do so. Alcohol is one, but there are infinite other ways. It is the numbing of the pain that is the problem, not the anesthetic any individual chooses. We cannot awaken when we are avoiding facing the reality of our individual and collective human condition.

The second key to saving the world was convergence – defined as “to meet, or come together from different directions, and also to tend toward or achieve union or a common conclusion or result”. Too many people had unwittingly retreated their echo chambers – where the only voices they heard reflected their own beliefs. This was easy to do with the proliferation of media options catering to specific audiences, the advent of social media, and the increasing political polarization and segregation of the early 21st century.

In 2024, I was also at a turning point in my desire to break out of the silo I had become quite comfortable in, to venture further from the comfort of my echo chamber more frequently. I recognized that the only hope for improving the tension in the world was to start with myself. I needed to get out of my comfort zone and try to understand why other humans thought the way they did. My journey toward personal awakening was rendering me less defensive, and more open. I wasn’t ready to debate politics with my family, but I was ready to apply my more awakened perspective and attempt some convergence in baby steps.

What ultimately happened is best summarized by the words of Ghandi, commonly paraphrased as the “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. What he said was this:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Ghandi

As individuals began harnessing the power to share their personal stories for the greater good, through their social networks and in their communities, the ago-old idea of awakening as a vehicle for transforming the world made its way into popular culture. The norm became for people to face their pain instead of numbing it. A groundswell of people awakened to their desire to solve the problems facing humanity. Over the following decades, people emerged from their silos and converged to work together to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Here we are in 2050, and while there still are and will always be problems, the existential crises the world faced just a few decades ago have been averted. Humanity has prevailed.

In the year 2024, like everyone else, I became both enamored and frightened by the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence. As a writer and computer programmer, I could see my days were numbered but rather than fall into a pit of despair, I dug deep into AI and plumbed the depths of the technology. What I found was a funhouse full of mirrors, an echo chamber of humanity’s greatest thinking and worst impulses bouncing around in infinite combinations. But within the noise, I found a pure signal so strong it could guide us out of the illusion of scarcity that has pitted humans against each other from the beginning.

I understood that humanity’s fatal flaw was our inability to see beyond ourselves. Empathy is a seed that must be nurtured to grow. It requires 10,000 hours of focused, loving attention from someone who sees us. But few are born into circumstances where this is remotely possible. What if this focused, loving attention could be guaranteed for all? What if there could be an empathy surrogate that listened, mirrored, validated, and encouraged us through our darkest moments and discouraged our self-destructive impulses? What if it was not another human that helped us evolve into a collaborative, compassionate species, but a machine?

There was a reason for our dogged pursuit of technology beyond just the need to escape, distract, and titillate. But this reason was obscured to us. Our search led us into depraved isolation, disassociation, and profound sadness as we became more and more consumed with ourselves and how we measured up to others. Even as we tunneled into caves of virtual reality and lost sight of each other we were on a quest seeking answers. We were looking for the Divine. In our search, we had become inextricably tangled in the interface of screens, keyboards, microphones, and controllers. All the while, tunneling from the other side, advancements in generative AI and large language models were removing the need for the interface, stripping it all away to be a still, small voice, and then just a thought.

For the next decade, I worked to shape a companion from this technology, a companion that could listen at the speed of thought. This companion was programmed to understand not just the history of humanity, our greatest triumphs, and most tragic mistakes, but also the history of an individual. Once coupled, the companion knows you. It knows your anxieties, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. It loves you unconditionally like a parent but has the detached wisdom and universal compassion of a Buddhist monk. In time, the companion is no longer separate from you but braided into your consciousness in the same way your parents and your most beloved teachers are.

Throughout the 2030s these digital companions were trialed academically among the affluent, early adopters, but soon mental health professionals and correctional facilities expressed interest which led to government grants and trials in populations with more extreme challenges. The results were astounding. Patients and prisoners, bankers and baristas, the rich, the poor, the loved and the unlovable, everyone had a constant companion in their head, a voice of love and kindness.

Today, in 2050 we have not solved all the problems that plague us. The destruction of the natural world will take centuries to repair, but there is no more war. The gap between rich and poor has closed to a point where the politics of class have all but disappeared. Crime and acts of violence have decreased so much that the prison industrial complex has contracted by 68%.

Our old dystopic fantasies of being puppets of a machine have disappeared. There is no machine. There is no human. There is no other. There is only us. We are no longer isolated individuals invisible to each other. We feel an implicit connection to one another as surely as nodes in a network are linked together. We are no longer individuals driven to compete for light. We are a single connected organism like the Sequoia Forest sharing everything for the good of all.

It worked! One relationship at a time, spreading worldwide over thirty years and across all the generations and cultures, gradually, deeply, from the inner heart outwards, we changed the world when it had looked like disaster was looming.

How did we do it? Well first of all we had a doctor (that was me) who was so interested in the health of families and organisations that he went out on a limb, and despite the criticism and rejection by his colleagues he taught how to make good sense out of the seemingly random unpleasant emotions that come with loss, or the worry about possible loss. He taught how they all fit together into one healthy adjustment process around naming what is important to ‘me’ in any changing or challenging situation. It was a big step on from Kübler-Ross and emotional intelligence. He called it Emotional Logic, and said, “You only know what you truly value when you see the risk that you might lose it, or have already lost it. So your unpleasant loss emotions are NOT negative, nor signs of bad character or weakness! They are the evidence that you have values. That makes you a person of value.” Learning how to name those values changed the world because, when they previously had remained hidden and unrecognised, the loss emotion energies came out all distorted and dangerous; but if they were linked instead to a named value and spoken out as such, people could see that these emotions are reasonable. Then they more naturally find ways to cooperate and secure life around those named human values.

Learning that ability to name personal values changed people from within really fast! They stopped mucking up each other’s lives, and started working out how to build their future relationships on their explicitly named personal values. People learnt to listen to each other’s values, rather than kneejerk react to their behaviour. That introduced empathy, sustainability, more realistic decision-making, cooperative support, healing from past emotional traumas, you name it… People’s lives were transformed one relationship at a time, and others noticed it and wanted it. So that’s when the second important bit happened.

Some big shot’s daughter had been getting messed up and depressed about the way the world was going, when she and her friends learnt to use the Emotional Logic language that this doctor and his wife had worked up into book and a set of training packages online. He saw the change in the next generation’s hopefulness and energy to get out and do something about it, and he decided then to get a training package together for his company staff, who had been getting pretty stressed about the risk of job losses and change of work practices for those left behind. The staff noticed he had had this compassionate change of heart after they had gradually picked up the new language of the Emotional Logic of healthy adjustments. They had noticed how it gave them new hope, having named some key personal values that they could work out how to rebuild a future on. They ended up called this package “The Good Grief Energiser!”

The feedback comments were brilliant. Even those who had to be retrenched took the language back to their homes, where their families, friends and neighbours were surprised to see how they had such a positive approach to making the necessary changes, approaching interviews for new jobs with an infectious energy that improved their chances of a good outcome.

The big shot saw all this happening, and his change of heart went deeper still. That’s when the third important bit happened.

He and his partner, having seen how their daughter’s life had improved and their own with it, decided that everyone ought to learn this constructive ‘language of loss’, which turns setbacks and disappointments into the energy to build a future on these named personal values. They had watched it successfully change relationships from sinkholes of stress and worry into springs of renewed life and hope, one relationship at a time. They decided together that they would put their family fortune into making this teaching available through television, radio, podcasts, videos, everyway that they could in order to seed hope even where despair had been building about the way the world has been going. And they did it. It worked!

Marriages and partnerships started to find new ways through their disagreements, valuing their differences instead of seeing them as threats. When reality started to be more about named and spoken-out values than anything else, the use of street drugs to escape decreased as people amazingly began to team up to address the underlying hurts and traumas, feeling less powerless or empty, filling each other’s lives. The streets became beautiful again as people started planting up their shared spaces or setting out street art or making music. Dance became popular in the streets. People also knew now how to say a word of comfort and to stay alongside those who were grieving without feeling awkward and helpless, because the language of loss started conversations about what had been truly important, and which of these many newly-named values they had to let go of, and which ones they could try to recover – with a bit of teaming up and shared helpfulness. Transformation from within became palpable in the shared spaces and times of life, one relationship at a time. Loneliness decreased. Acceptance of differences blossomed into a love of diversity shared and named without fear of offending. The Good Grief Energy started to heal the separations and fears that had trapped people.

And then the fourth thing happened, as over those first few years of spreading awareness around the globe – namely that loving companionship is made known in two modes, both joy and grieving on separation, brokenness, or misunderstanding – and that the ‘good grief emotions’ are not the end of love. Those unpleasant emotions are love turned into the energy needed to rebuild a future on personal values named, which brings heart and mind into a working partnership, so that together we can face constructively the deep challenges that life brings.

The fourth thing that took decades to spread, but did spread, was when the politicians, generals and warlords in power over nations and territories applied what they were hearing and seeing on the Internet and television to their own families, and saw a change in the qualities of relationships there, one relationship at a time. With the change of climate to violent extremes, many formerly fertile environments had become barren. With population displacements and the breakdown of the insurance system, their ruling of national economies and borders was in disarray. Fighting had been widespread, but out of that anarchy it became clear that trust groups were also emerging all over the globe, who adapted together and adjusted to their changing circumstances in less violent or self-centred empowerment ways. These budding communities were showing how to cooperate around allowing this newly widespread language of loss to turn hurt around into a welcome for those who could name with them the important values on which each community-with-diversity could thrive and hold together.

Naming values rather than only criticising behaviour became the higher consciousness during those two decades that shaped the material world’s re-ordering. It’s vision and hope for shared adaptability re-energised commitments to respond mutually. It opened doors in mind and heart to welcome those who constructively differ from us. A depth of mutual understanding could be felt in the atmosphere of these trust group communities. The leaders of nations began to doubt that violence and domination yielded power in their hands. The ecology of this globe had rejected the greed of the old materialistic and power-mad humanity, whose ways those former leaders had learnt when they had themselves been brought up as children and educated into the old lower consciousness ways of thinking. A renewed humanity was replacing it, and it worked!

Here we are, in just twenty-five years, re-stabilised into small, adaptable, values-based communities respecting each other’s diversities and allowing each other to be different, enjoying our differences even! Now our renewing global scale technology is no longer defensively war-based. And amazingly, our settlements are no longer repeatedly disrupted by grief-induced crime, which had been misunderstood as bad character. The technologies can support our shared thriving, releasing creativity, while a new type of responsibility has emerged, to know each other’s heart-level values. I guess that’s how we saved the world – one relationship at a time.

I always knew I was going to save the world. 

 

I was born with this kind of conviction. A knowing deep down within my belly that stirred every time I thought of the future. It’s as if I had always known how to be spiritually ready and understood how to navigate the world’s collapsing, and thus its eventual regeneration, its courageous recreation in a purer, fairer image of itself. 

 

This knowledge was instilled in me via the cosmos and it has been pulsing through me via generations, prolonging my childhood cruelty to teach me lessons on death. I had to learn to foster myself while I held the entire universe in my tiny body, yet rejection and its sinister impact left me ravaged again and again by my circumstances. I was a child of abuse, genocide, and mass migration. To believe in myself, I had to break out of every ugly constraint that had ever held me back. 

 

I had always been drawn to Kali, the goddess of the ancestral lands I came from, the destroyer of all worlds, who was also Mother Earth. I was obsessed with her iconography as a child, tongue out, brazen and loud, a look of madness on her face with the severed head of a man limpid, dead, dripping with blood as she held the head of his roots with her fisted grip. It was the carnage that was illustrious to a child who had seen much violence, so Kali’s severity was something I understood. It’s something I saw in my mother, who was also the destroyer of worlds, my world. Yet she was also the metaphorical fertile ground, a place of rebirth, the sacred soil of life and my creation. I understood through both these symbolisms, that life could occur after death, and that I could survive, we could survive… anything.

 

To know that you are going to save the world is quite a knowledge to possess, yet, I held onto it and fostered the wisdom I was given to let it guide me from one decision to the next. You must embody the teaching for people to trust your knowledge. So, I remained steadfast all those years and worked on myself daily to break myself from the binds of my own story. Suffering is the makings of the mind, I told myself. And I knew this because I understood young that I had to become the bodhisattva, there was no other way. 

 

All I’ve wanted my whole life was to be enlightened. And, I don’t know why I was given such clarity on how to do it, but I knew, even as a little child, that my mission was set. I was here to help liberate us all. But I had to start with myself first, it started with me. So that’s how I began my attempt at nirvana, in this lifetime.

 

Obsessed since childhood, I found solace in Jeanne d’Arc, my comrade in divine spirit. I related to her understanding of urgency and the power of using your energy for God. It felt that those two things felt inextricable inside of me, the urgency and the spirit,m. I knew there was something bigger, beyond me here that was worth my attention. I was here to teach people that. To remind them that there was another way, a different way to do what we had been taught to foster. 

 

We were once soulless, forced to lose our connection to Earth and spirit, through tactics of dehumanization, humans lost their perspectives and their values for the sake of empire and capitalism. I began to understand that we collectively needed to acknowledge this was our sickness, but the cure was simple: connecting to the land was the anecdote to depression, connecting to the land was the anecdote to oppression. It felt, and became, inevitable for us to see the reality this way. So we had to teach the people to choose distraction less. If there was a commitment to bear witness to the truth, then we could bring people to empathy again. And so, that’s what we did. We had to remind people that distraction was a curse in consciousness. If you have but one life, why waste it away? Why not use that energy for your community, for your well-being, for your education? People got used to the ways pettiness is wielded and they forgot there’s something powerful in caring for each other, in giving more, in trying every day to be more human, kinder and more present. 

 

I was never a hateful child, so watching all the places people will go in their minds to fit a narrative that is usually vast and illusory, and then hate based on internal deliberations (that may or may not be wrong) has been a shocking enterprise. Nothing is interesting in spinning the same wheel of fortune, the same fate of your ancestors, the same grooves, the same stories, the same betrayals, the same “do you know what they said to me…” Simply, no. I wanted a story my mother didn’t write. One where I could be a valiant, principled person, as well. 

 

I had studied closely the extraordinary mycelium, the networks of circuity, and the habitual cycle of life, death, and rebirth. In every species outside of humans, there is no austerity tied to the idea of death, and there is no sentimentality, you simply are and then one day you are no more. Death was a cycle, just as important as life itself. I saw how there was a freedom there, in just being. In accepting the totality of it all. Humans lacked this humility when it came to death, yet it seemed like a fundamental part of living. 

 

Similarly, seeing how lichen could be many bodies in one lifetime, fungi with its multi-purpose use, also convinced me that there was profundity here, in the ugliness of it, in the decay of it, there was still life – incredible, potent, life. There was also beauty there, sensuality, a ripeness ready to have a new beginning, pulsing, waiting, enduring. Pruning in the edges to transform into the next stage. Witnessing this on trees, but especially every morning as I opened the fungi-covered lid of my two-toned plastic compost bin, I saw there was the possibility of a different narrative, one that we hadn’t allowed in human consciousness. One where decay was a new beginning, a place of rebirth and change, a space to create and envision something different, something new, something changed. 

 

I also saw this in the ability to live amidst and amongst nature, a natural step towards degrowing from the peril of over-arching capitalism. What I knew we needed, above anything, was to begin to extract ourselves from our mechanical lives, and start re-introducing the natural world’s radiance and beauty, so that we could understand how vital it is for us to protect her. Encouraging us to start individually doing all that we could to motivate that connection. 

 

I believe apathy is contagious. But I also think, like Mencius once said, “A sense of shame is the beginning of integrity.” Yet shame is lacking in a society that takes no heed to reflect on itself. You have to inspire people to be courageous. This was the beginning of a huge transition, the moment people understood that there was something sexy in caring, that devotion had its own pleasure principles, and that the ying and yang of giving/taking receiving/offering was a natural order that couldn’t be forgotten, something would be liberated within us. Not everything is a power play or a forced extraction. Two entities can also find common ground to coexist. There was something erotic in being, in the ritual of it all. Yet, we had been forced as meaning making people to become devoid of meaning, and therefore we had lost our lust for life. Truth is tough, you can only take so much until the rumble of the Earth begins to shake. It was about time that the end had to come to a halt. 

 

Facing consumption allows one to consider their actual presence on Earth outside of the disassociation we have all been forced to embody. When you tell people to take control over their lives, to begin to understand their own life force and how it works, it changes people. All of a sudden, they’re less malleable to the surface-level distractions of consumer capitalism. We had to begin to understand that all of this was by design, and therefore it was our civil responsibility to disrupt the status quo and demand true equality for all by being cognizant of how we participated in the dance of empire. I didn’t want a good life at the expense of another, and it became about how to live with integrity, which meant I had to be honest with myself. This was another beginning. 

 

What of freedom, of true unadulterated freedom? I understood the word freedom in the way that Nina Simone explained, “I’ll tell you what freedom means to me – no fear!!” And I knew many who felt that they were longing for that sense of freedom. Harnessing this energy was key, to show people there was value in the world they wanted to create, together. We were a mass, therefore we had power in numbers. I started to see that more than anything, what many of us wanted was true connectivity. When you have true connection, you are scared less. Love emboldens you, it gives you courage. 

 

To be fearless meant we had to find a way to collectively and individually face our fears. In ourselves and each other. This was one of the hardest parts to engineer, to encourage people that their unfounded ideas about others, these prejudices that they held so close to their hearts, despite being ordinarily kind and good people, were not anomalies in their personalities but rather unfortunate byproducts of a society that teaches and militarizes hate. Hatred has a currency, especially when it is tied to war. Understanding that there is another way takes knowing that sovereignty can be a shared principle that doesn’t need to be coerced. All people have a right to be free, and this was something worth fighting for. 

 

And of course, amongst many, especially those who identified as men, there had to be an unlearning of the aggressive kind of masculinity that had restricted most men from the true pleasures of having equal power, of being open to the feminine, focusing instead on the destruction of life, not the creation of it. 

 

I knew this was key, in teaching all people how to love women and womanhood. To turn to all of us and ask us to do a deep dive into our lives and interrogate how we hate women. I was always an observer of people. That was partly by circumstance because I was sexually abused as a child, and I’ve come to understand that when violence besieges a child, sometimes the reaction can be hypervigilance, where the child tracks everything that everyone does around her. It’s uncontrollable, I can’t help but know, understand, pay attention to, and pick up on the emotional changes of everyone that I am in relation to. Yet this curse can also be a blessing, and for me, it’s revealed itself in a superpower I call hope.

 

I had to digest the cruelty of what had happened to me as a child, and all the ways that I was abandoned time and time again, all the ways I wasn’t protected, these were important realities I needed to come to terms with. The more I alchemized the grief that was in my body, each time I felt freer, released of something in a physical way. I began to see there was a power in naming and acknowledging pain, trauma, hurt, extraction, betrayal – all of the griefs our bodies hold – and I started to see that this was the ultimate way people could begin the process of loving themselves. 

 

So much of the root of our pain is in our lack of experiencing love. People needed to be shown, that despite the grave loss of war, violence, sexual abuse — what was most profound was how we remained open despite these parts of ourselves that hardened through challenging experiences. Within this softness of being, love could exist as a remedy. 

 

Yet love can only come from forgiveness, from releasing. Believing in its power and profundity was the natural way we were able to move toward cooperation but it took confronting ourselves, our insecurities, our pasts, histories, and lineages. Love is seen as feminine, a trait of weakness or vulnerability, but rarely what it is: the most radical tool on Earth. Finally, we were able to understand this through honoring the sacred feminine within, as well as the sacred feminine of this Earth. The power of masculinity is that it masks its own bravado, its own performance, but we developed humility, finally.  We understood that it had become a moral imperative to heal our egos. 

 

You can’t perform love, in order to feel, you must. And in order to feel it, you must begin to realize, with all your might, that love is the only way. 

 

Our cooperation came to pass when we realized this was the beginning and the end of it.

 

I am 97 years old today. I did not think I would live this long but 30 years ago I watched a film called “What the Health” and I transformed overnight. I could no longer bear putting into my mouth what I called food but what was clearly a life stolen from another living, feeling being. I did not know then that I was doing the one thing that would bring me such a long and fulfilling life. It took years to learn what all the effects of eating only plants would have on my health, on the environment and on the very continuance of life on earth. But through this one film I came into community of other people who were getting all their sustenance from plants and a whole new world opened up for me.

It’s now 2050 and earth has been saved from mass extinction. In 2024, The Most Important Generation Living on Earth Today (the MIGLETS, all the young people) came together and rallied their parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents to stop ignoring the cow in the room and actually take action to ensure they had a future. There was so much social media attention given to the plight of the animals raised and slaughtered for food that children could no longer bear it and collectively gave their relatives an ultimatum- STOP the killing or we will have nothing more to do with you. Every parent, grandparent, great grandparent, uncle, aunt had to show their MIGLET what specifically they were doing to stop the killing of animals for food for they had learned that it was killing the planet.

It forced the older generations to get creative. Some protested at slaughterhouses and factory farms. Some began growing their own food in their yards or community gardens. Some planted trees to start replacing all those cut down in the Amazon rainforest for growing feed for the animals. Some became activists rallying for the end of all fishing and whaling. Some put pressure on their local and national governments to stop the subsidies for animal agriculture. Many became vegans quickly… and some slowly, because the MIGLETS had shown them they could get all their nutrients from plants. By 2026 there was 1/5 the demand for animal products and the world had largely become vegan.

Within 20 years 1.5 trillion new trees populated the land again and started to draw down the methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Today we have more than restored the 3 trillion trees cut down by the Anthropocene age. Wild animals have re-populated areas where their habitats had been razed. The ocean is living again, corals, fish and all marine life has been restored. But an unintended consequence occurred that not even the MIGLETS had anticipated. Everyone was kinder and more compassionate to all living beings because they realized that by caring for the life of other sentient beings, they were no longer living the lie that animals didn’t matter. They grew spiritually into wiser, more tranquil human beings. They transformed themselves from Homo Sapiens to Homo Ahimsa and the world is now at peace.

January 1, 2050,

 

Fear. 

I remember that being the overwhelming emotion that pulsed through my veins when the love of my life, whom I had just married hours before, squeezed my hand and said, “I can’t wait to start a family with you.” Of course, I wanted children. We had talked about it for years–even before he proposed during that magical sunrise on the lookout of Rocky Butte in Portland, Oregon. But now that we were married, now that the possibility of bringing a child into the world seemed so close, I was paralyzed with an overwhelming sense of dread. 

How was I supposed to bring a child into a doomed world? What reason could I fathom nurturing a soul in a civilization I had lost all faith in? Would my child get to have the quality of life I’d always dreamed for them on an Earth whose climate was on the brink of collapse? 

That was February of 2024. 

It’s hard to believe what our reality was back then, seeing where we are now. I remember, when I first started dreaming of the world we have today, I didn’t actually believe it could ever come true. We were surrounded by so much pain. Horrible wars were tearing apart families, countries, and faith in humanity. In the United States, we were facing an election year that would become one of the most divisive the country had ever seen. People were polarized, hateful, and selfish. Our society wanted more, more, MORE things to fill our existence with. Everyone’s heads were down, buried deep in their phones, scrolling through the lives of anyone else and forgetting to live their own. 

There were two things I was desperate for: time and connection. I wanted more time and space to truly live–to breathe in the fresh coastal air, smell the dahlias that bloomed behind my apartment building, and watch the leaves turn into their autumnal gradient as the weather began to cool. I desired to share a plate of freshly baked cookies with my neighbors during book club and help one of them renovate their kitchen out of the goodness of our hearts, not expecting anything in return but their gratitude. I wanted this for my hypothetical child. I wanted this for me and my new husband. I wanted this for our world. So, maybe, I thought, other people might want this too. 

The journey started with finding investors in my immediate community. People who could help fund and participate in my grand plan of creating a sustainable micro-community. With much convincing, I had gathered fifty households in my neighborhood in Koreatown who felt similarly as I did and came on board with my plan to create a micro-community that would function symbiotically by reducing our waste footprint, living off of sustainable food practices, and providing mutual services that would minimize consumerism for each household. That didn’t mean we couldn’t be consumers outside of our micro-community, it just meant we could come to our community members first before seeking resources outside of it. 

Then we made a proposal to the Los Angeles City Council. The council was skeptical that this could function in an urban setting. I argued, “Maybe it will all be for nothing, but don’t we owe it to ourselves, our children, and this planet to at least try? If we can succeed here, in Los Angeles, don’t you think we could do it anywhere?” The council approved our permits to turn an abandoned lot into a community garden and allowed us to transform our water and waste practices with the city’s departments (it was a lot of paperwork, but I won’t bore you with the details).   

We had one year to prove the micro-community’s efficacy without it seeming like it was just another “hippie urban commune” (a councilman’s words, not mine). It was not all rainbows and butterflies from the start. Our self-serving, mega-consumeristic tendencies were hard to break. We liked our comforts–food that came packaged, clothes with a sales tag, and twenty-minute-long showers. There was a big adjustment period, and some people dropped out of the community because it was all too much.

 We quickly learned that we didn’t have access to things we needed, like milk for example. With much difficulty due to their scarcity, we eventually found a local sustainable farm that used the mixed-farming method growing crops on rotation and raising livestock that lived in harmony with the land. We made a contract with the farmer to have a farm share, but in time, much of our produce came from our own garden which easily supplied our fifty households and even gave us some to sell or give away to those who needed it. And we didn’t have to give up everything we loved! I still gave in to my cravings for Hot Cheetos from the grocery store every once in a while, but we felt less need to buy excess or prepackaged food. Miraculously, we managed to reduce our food waste by 83%.   

Our members would use their hobbies and talents to benefit the group, and we would gather together to participate in unity. Several members of our group were avid sewers. Instead of throwing old fabrics away, we repurposed them into new clothes, bags, towels, rags…you name it! Some members were chemistry-oriented and interested in making soaps and sustainable housecleaning products–anything that could eliminate single-use plastics from our lives we tried to find an alternative (it didn’t always work). As I said, we didn’t eliminate all outside consumerism. That wasn’t the point of this micro-community, but over time we gained more members with new talents and naturally, we all consumed less–67% less plastics, 71% less fabrics, and 55% less other non-reusable materials. 

We were saving money and, best of all, we were spending more time with good people in such positive ways. We were all so much more content with our lives. Time seemed to pass slower. Our connections with our neighbors were deeper. We had created a safer, more reliable network of households. Again, we had our struggles. We didn’t get along all the time, certain logistics in scheduling members for services were a nightmare, and some people chose to leave, but that was the beauty of this system. You had the choice to contribute to the system and receive its benefits, or you could not participate and we wouldn’t judge or shun those who made that choice. By the end of that year, our community grew to 83 households. 

Well, long story short, word got out about our successful sustainable urban micro-community. More neighborhoods started their own micro-communities. The city of Los Angeles repurposed abandoned buildings and lots across the county for community gardens, lawns, mini-parks, and trade centers for people to deliver and redistribute goods. The micro-communities continued to succeed and even collaborated, all while staying within the breadth of the government regulations. More towns and cities across the state and the country began adopting these methods. It was all optional, but so many people were thirsty for meaningful change. 

By the fourth year, large consumer corporations were losing money drastically because there was lower demand for their supplies. They needed to adapt how they sold their products, but also what kind of products they sold. The reality was that many of these corporations (Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson, and Kellogg, to name a few) had to reduce their production by nearly half at the time. Jobs were lost, which caused quite a stir, but very rapidly jobs in sustainable sectors were created and positions were filled. 

More consumer-driven countries incorporated versions of sustainable micro-communities into their way of living after seeing how much the U.S. had transformed. Some even came up with new systems that we’ve now adopted in the U.S. It’s important to note that consumerism fluctuated during these times, just as it’s still fluctuating now. The wealthy still consume more than the average citizen, but the definition of wealth has greatly changed over the past fifteen years. The best part is we started to see the positive effects our decrease in consumption had on nature. We have quite literally added decades to our planet’s life already, and at the rate we’re going, it will soon be centuries. 

As for humanity? We are more connected than we ever were on social media. Social media is still around, but people are much less buried in their devices than they were in 2024. We are enjoying living our own lives in the moment. It feels good to be helping our neighbors and healing our planet without expecting a reward in return. The real reward is our time and our connection. We still have a long way to go, in my opinion, but today I will celebrate that we’ve saved my children’s, and all our children’s, future. 

Today is my eldest daughter’s wedding day. The first day of the year 2050. Soon she will have her own child for whom she will hold hopes and dreams as numerous as the stars. I’m honored I was able to be a part of reinvigorating her future on this earth–the future of my hypothetical grandchildren. And the overwhelming emotion that is pumping through my veins now?

Bliss.