Sometimes I imagine a world we've designed to bring out the best in ourselves and in each other. I imagine governing systems where the kindest, most thoughtful, most reflective people are the ones elevated to positions of great power and responsibility.

I imagine a built environment designed around what makes the human organism healthy and happy. Where buildings and city blocks are set up for neighbors to gather and children to safely play and everyone as a little bit of green in their life.

I imagine an industrial ecology where circular flows of material and energy are the norm, where the default choice is also be the planetarily wise one and where frugality with energy and materials is built in to everything.

I imagine a life-long education system that sees each of us as unique and special with essential gifts to develop for ourselves, where skills like listening, consensus seeking, learning, emotional intelligence and mindfulness are the top priority.

I imagine a media and information system that prizes the accuracy and fidelity of information and is so well supported for the public good that it remains free and unbiased and where every citizen nevertheless knows how to ask hard questions for themselves.

Sometimes at the end of a long week like this one has been I feel tired and sad about the distance between the world we have and the one that could be.

But then I remember that the world we have is just the product of ideas, codified into bricks and asphalt and organizations and life goals, and that when ideas shift bricks and asphalt and organizations and goals shift too.

Don't lower your vision. Hold out for a world that works for everyone for the long haul.

With a few different founding assumptions, that world would actually be a lot easier to bring into being than the one we've got, which takes constant spending, constant distortion of information, constant violence, and constant numbing of emotions to perpetuate itself.