In ‘Global Weirding and Deep Adaptation‘ (2018), I toyed with the idea that the spectrum of options for envisioning the future is wider than what can be gleaned from two of the most popular clusters of tropes, which I loosely labeled “techno-utopian” and “neo-primitivist,” respectively. From there, I argued for fleshing out different strains of pragmatism that might attempt to salvage elements from the past and present in order to construct novel, context‑dependent, negotiated hybrid futures.

In a post for The Learning Planet, Bridget McKenzie offers a complementary narrative for would‑be futurists through what she calls a “possitopian” approach—one that refuses to privilege either utopian or dystopian imaginaries. Instead, McKenzie urges people to remain open to the myriad of possibilities in which both positive and negative situations and outcomes combine and coexist to shape an unknown, immediate future:

“Being Possitopian means both facing the worst and imagining the best, in ways that are both much more rational and critical, and much more creative and open‑minded. And also, it means anticipating the future much more frequently, in many more situations and permutations, involving a greater diversity of people. Managing the risks of the planetary emergency is not about working out the best response to the most likely outcome, it is about determining the best response to the full distribution of possible outcomes.”

I think Bridget hits on a crucial insight: the benefits of cultivating the capacity to remain open and agile in both our thinking and attitudes as a meta‑adaptive strategy. Possitopian orientations could be essential for those of us seeking to adapt to challenging circumstances and collectively salvage the future, by helping us develop more flexible dispositions, toolkits, and imaginaries capable of escaping capture by any particular ideological or theological vision of what the future holds.

To be sure, as social‑ecological systems continue to break down, unevenly distributed disruption and fragmentation will place extraordinary demands on people—demands that will no doubt surprise them with regard to the intensity and multiple scales of the impacts. Adopting a possitopian attitude can help people remain sufficiently open to such surprises, and therefore become more readily capable and willing to scan their immediate horizons for practical opportunities, important interventions, and rapid transitions. This kind of open anticipatory awareness can also prime folks for ideas and strategies that might have seemed strange or inappropriate within previous reinforced frames of reference and evaluation, but may now be adaptive given changed circumstances.

What does it mean, though, to remain open in this way? To tarry with possibility? To tarry is not to flit rapidly among possibilities, nor to suspend judgment indefinitely. Rather, it is to dwell patiently with uncertainty, allowing competing futures to coexist without forcing a premature resolution. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in Tarrying with the Negative, argues that tarrying with what seems negative or contradictory can reveal hidden productive forces. A possitopian adaptation of this idea would be tarrying with the possible: holding space for both catastrophic and hopeful scenarios, not as an act of indecision but as a rigorous discipline.

More from the article:

The Possitopian approach to future thinking expands the cone of the possible future, draws on geophysical realities and data, and also applies imagination to help you imagine future scenarios which are potentially worse or better than you might allow yourself to think.

“Possitopian thinking maybe offers a field rather than a path. It helps you resist predefined or hackneyed visions. We already know images of dystopia and utopian from movies and advertising. There may well be utopian and dystopian patterns which form out of cultural tropes (e.g. tech will save us) and psychological states…

Possitopian approaches don’t try to create a third trope but to overcome fixed, limited and binary ways of thinking. Many people might flip from dystopian to utopian visions – drawing on what culture has offered them – depending on their feelings at any moment. Possitopian practice allows us to imagine new possibilities by talking and weaving together rather than flipping helplessly.”

Ultimately, adopting a possitopian orientation means learning to tarry with the possible—not as passive hesitation, but as a disciplined willingness to hold multiple, contradictory futures in view at once. In the turbulent times ahead, this practice offers something more durable than vague optimism or brittle certainty: the flexibility to deliberate, collaborate, and act even as conditions shift beneath our feet. What will be required is not a thin sense of hope, but the courage to dwell with uncertainty, to scan for unexpected opportunities, and to build livable alternatives together—without pretending to know which future will finally arrive.

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