When we think about the future, our minds turn almost effortlessly to bad things.

Maybe it's the climate problem, or the AI apocalypse, or political chaos, the list

goes on and on.

Dystopianism has always been an easy game to play, and there's something useful about

imagining how badly things might go if we don't deal with our issues now.

If nothing else, it's a check against inaction.

But why don't we spend more time imagining a better future?

If imagining the worst-case scenario is a useful exercise, then imagining the best-case scenario

must also be useful, and for the same reasons.

So why does this seem so much harder to do?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

My guest today is Kristin Godsee.

She's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the new book Everyday Utopia,

what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life.

During the early days of the pandemic, Kristin researched different utopian experiments

over the last two centuries to see what we might learn from them.

For her, it's a mistake to use terms like utopian and unrealistic interchangeably.

Because we made the world, and we can always remake it.

There are limits, of course, but there are also infinite possibilities.

The pandemic was instructive in this way.

It forced so many of us to do what previously seemed far-fetched, like pulling our resources

together, or working from home, or forming makeshift parenting pods to help with childcare.

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