Existential Hope and Imagining Possible Futures

The importance of positive-sum speculative and imaginative visions of our future

Last year, I came across the concept of Existential Hope, via the Foresight Institute and its current President, Allison Duettmann. What is Existential Hope? According to the Existential Hope website, it is a combination of ideas, technologies and projects for the flourishing of life. In particular, it is about offering a counter-narrative to the prevailing one of existential risk and catastrophe, and offering some possible paths forward. In a lot of ways, it is a forward-thinking and future-focused concept and perspective. It’s also inherently ambitious and big-picture in view. A look at the Existential Hope website’s section on the topic has the following subsections:

·          Reasons for optimism

·          Uncovering a Long History: Our Story

·         Discovering how far we got: Progress

·         Exploring a Long Road Ahead: Long-Termism

·         Dreaming Big: Utopias

·         Diving into Futurisms: Transhumanism, Cosmism & Co

·         Fuelled By Fiction: Sci-Fi

As the above sections show, there is an ambitious and far-sighted perspective augmenting Foresight Institute’s other work. Foresight Institute has a focus on funding early-stage and developing technologies in the fields of intelligent co-operation, molecular machines, space technology and nanomachines. All of these are fields which traditionally struggle to gain significant funding from legacy institutions and venture funds. Yet, these are fields which have the potential to revolutionize the world as we know it.

While the work that Foresight Institute focuses on is of great interest to me (disclosure: I am an associate member of the Institute), I want to take the concept of existential hope and apply it to governance, organization and systems. I’m also interested in seeing where this idea might fit in on social initiatives and enterprises. Public institutions and governmental organizations are generally not associated with being far-forward thinking and creative. When we think of government and of public institutions, we tend to think of slow, incremental progress. A steady guiding hand, if you have a favourable view and a sclerotic, sluggish organization if not. In either instance, dynamic, unorthodox thinking and action is generally not the perception of such organizations.

If we look beyond the surface level, however, there are ample examples of public institutions and governments showing foresight and imagining possible futures. On a nation-state level, Estonia’s e-Estonia and Taiwan’s digital government are experimenting with the combination of technology and democracy in ways that go beyond what is typical of nation-states at present. There are also more local examples of existential hope-aligned thinking being implemented in public sector programs. At the time of writing, there is a program called Camden Imagines, run by Phoebe Tickell, founder of the organization Moral Imaginations. The program aims to help workers in London’s Camden Council develop imagination as a skill for innovation and conceptualizing solutions to complex problems. From this perspective imagination, rather than being viewed as a peripheral, if not irrelevant trait to possess, becomes a central part of the work done by the Council. Crucially, it also becomes something practiced by all, not just the fortunate few to have the time to do so. Increasing the number of imaginative perspectives raised increases the number of potential solutions and ideas raised, increasing the possibility space, or opening the Overton window further.

A recent article on Demos Helsinki’s website highlights two examples of foresight being integrated into policymaking in Finland and Singapore. One of the commonalities of the two countries’ foray into foresight in policymaking was the realization that being relatively small nations, creative and forward-thinking approaches were needed in order to ensure their continued prosperity and to have the ability to deal with future issues. Rather than reacting to the political environment around them, policymakers in Finland and Singapore sought to anticipate problems and opportunities, as a means of fully taking advantage of these situations. As was found with the Camden Imagines example, there were challenges to implementing this perspective, namely getting buy-in and ensuring foresight could be practice by all, not just a select few.


While the public sector and institutions have to deal with constraints not typically present in other sectors, this does not mean that expansive, positive visions of the future cannot be theorized and acted upon in these areas. In one of my previous posts, I wrote of some of my favourite problems, questions that I spend a lot of time thinking about. The organization of institutions, existential hope and speculative futures thinking and longer time horizon thinking were all among these questions, so it makes sense that I want to find a way to synthesize these in some form. Considering the contexts in which I work, as well as my overall views and perspectives, it’ll likely look quite different from the Foresight Institute’s interpretation of Existential Hope, or the Moral Imaginations perspective Phoebe Tickell brings to the table. However, I find both frameworks enlightening and energizing for the work I seek to do. Combining these perspectives as a catalyst for the work I am trying to do is an ambitious goal, but also one that keeps with the spirit of existential hope and an overall mindset of a positive future and a vision of abundance.