Accidental Gods Thrutopia Masterclass: Writing our Way to a Future we can be Proud to leave as our Legacy.
We live on stories. We thrive on visions of futures we want - or terrify ourselves with those we definitely don't. But when it comes to our own near-term future, we don't have the stories that tell us how we got it right. So we need to write them - Urgently!
One of the things that sets us apart from other species (as far as we know) is that we are forever building futures in our heads. Whenever we embark on something new: a relationship, a job, a project, a house move…it's fired and inspired by the stories we tell ourselves of how we'll feel, how others will engage with us, how our lives will be different - and often better. The futures might not pan out as we think, but we got ourselves where we need to be by our ability to shape ideas of a different reality.
And yet when we're confronted by the greatest, deepest emergency our species has ever known and while we have plenty of dystopic stories of how bad it could be (think HandMaid's tale, or The Road, or even Don't Look Up), and a few utopias set in other worlds or other times or other realities, what we don't have is a big - vast - body of work showing how we could get to somewhere we'd all want to go: somewhere that future generations would look back and say of us, 'Yes, it was hard, but they did everything they could, they all pulled together, they created a vision of a flourishing world and we're building on the foundations they left us.'
We need urgently to craft these stories: heroic journeys (or possibly post-heroic journeys) of how the world could be in the near term if we get it right, whatever that means. We need accurate, believable road maps of how to get from here to there. 'Here be Dragons' and big scary lines on the map doesn't cut it any more: we have to imagine things better.
And it's hard. We need a whole lot of research of the things that are happening now in a whole range of fields from politics and economics to food and farming through business, work, the future of cities, education, technology, social media... and we need to explore how to stitch the ideas together into workable narratives that will draw people with them, even if they're bombarded by the 'business as usual' stories of our media. We need to give our media new stories to tell, that they will believe and want to share.
And finally, we need the insights from industry professionals in publishing, film, TV, theatre… to help us get our new stories in front of the most possible people.
So this is Thrutopia Masterclass. It's an Ideas Generator, a Narrative Incubator and a Dissemination Guide. It's a Think Tank and a community, a writing masterclass like nothing you've ever seen before. Come and join us! https://thrutopia.life.
Or just share the link to this mini bonus podcast…