Optimistic Future

CWs:

I’ve been thinking a lot about depictions of the future, lately and in the past. There are so many dystopian ones out there, largely reflecting our current fears and worries and issues, but just pushing them to a safe, arms’-length future. It makes it easier to endure the hellscape of the present if we think the future could be so much worse, I guess? And it’s fun to speculate, I guess, but it’s also depressing. I don’t want to dissociate from the present by deferring grief. I’d rather feel it in the present.

There’s a danger in romanticizing the future, though, as well. Although I do love optimistic portrayals of the future. Aspirations for being our best selves, the people we wish we could be, the society we wish we could fashion. I think a lot about this with regard to EPCOT. After reading Sam Gennawey’s fascinating Walt and the Promise of Progress City (2011), I realized that as interesting as the actual planned EPCOT sounded, it seemed like another dystopia in (e)utopia’s clothing. Sure, you can live not far from where you work, in company-provided housing, but they always had it in the plans to cycle people out; nothing lasts forever. A home that is not a home. The deeper you dig into EPCOT, the more dystopian it sounds. But the idea is great and I think it’s a cool aspiration, even though it would not be ideal in practice. But I love it in theory.

Let’s rewind back to about 2015-16. I had finished my PhD and my spouse had agreed that it was OK for me to take a year off, work on writing and applying for tenure-track jobs, try to make this whole university thing work. I was listening to a lot of Disney music, as one does, and I came across the “Star Tunnel” music, a theme which I’d never (knowingly) heard before. It’s played in the queue of Space Mountain, and if you don’t listen carefully, you won’t really notice it. I happened to hear it on a Disney “radio station” online randomly and I was completely enthralled. It’s a lovely, calming, bright instrumental, full of hope and promise. I had no idea that this particular song had a vocal version.

The vocal version is called “We’ve Come So Far (Promising Tomorrows)” and it’s actually brilliant. Please check it out here and I hope y’all enjoy it. It’s sappy, it’s cheesy, but it’s also really pretty. The song was apparently written for a refurbishment in 1985 and really epitomizes the “optimistic future,” rather than a “used” or dystopian future. In the future described by the song, we can do anything we want, dream big, and the future is in front of us, glittering and shining as ever. None of this dystopian darkness, but we’re looking ahead to progress and sunlight. If you ignore that the song was written for when RCA sponsored Space Mountain, and is essentially corporate nothingness, it’s really quite nice. I like the sentiment. We can make the future what we want, happier days are ahead, the best isn’t behind us. I like the idea. I don’t know how realistic it is, but I think it’s worth aspiring to.

I think about that song a lot, ever since I first heard it. It makes me happy, and like a better world is possible. I know it is, we can do it if enough of us agree and make it better, but yeah. It’s comforting. It’s interesting because again, EPCOT is generally all about the future and progress and looking forwards, but we got a little gem out of the Space Mountain refurb and I don’t think it often goes acknowledged. EPCOT is full of optimistic futures, from the ride “Horizons” (which I sadly never went on, RIP) to Spaceship Earth, to the (dearly-departed) Universe of Energy, and others. As goofy as solarpunk can be, I think it carries the same torch. Believing we can, and should, be better than we are, and keep working on ourselves. EPCOT puts an optimistic spin on things, suggesting that the best is yet to come, right around the corner, and I think we need to hold onto that hope, but also manifest it ourselves, as well as we can. I may be a sucker but I kinda love all of that.

Speaking of optimism. My spouse finally convinced me to watch Ted Lasso, and while it often makes me angry that the whole show feels like a big iPhone/iPad ad (it’s on Apple TV, so yep), if you can get past it, it’s lovely. I heard about it being a very sappy, completely earnest, genuine, silly show. And it is. It has a lot of heart and it wears it on its sleeve. But it sees the best in people, shows you the worst of them, and explains that we all have our faults, but it’s OK, and we need to work on being better people. We make mistakes, we mess it up, we ruin everything, but we get back up and do something different, and try to make life a little better for ourselves and others, ideally. While Seinfeld was explicitly about characters who never grow, never learn from their experiences and mistakes, Ted Lasso is absolutely the opposite. Characters make mistakes all the time, are terrible, and others call them out on it, and they realize they should be better people. And they do work on it, over time. It’s not always easy (life never is), but they keep trying, over and over again. We’re in season 3 and people have absolutely improved over time. Characters I absolutely loathed at the beginning have worked on themselves and are becoming better people, every episode, step by step. Again, it’s cheesy, but I unironically love it. A character comes out as queer and, contrary to expectation, their teammates embrace them and love them. And the one who was upset about the revelation wasn’t upset about the revelation itself, but that his friend took so long to tell him and didn’t think he would be OK with it. Like, that’s wonderful. The last couple of episodes have made me nigh-teary. It’s lovely. I’m glad my spouse got me to watch it.

I know it’s just a silly TV show. But we see aspects of our lives playing out in these stories, aspects of people we want to be and people we wouldn’t ever want to be. Precepts and plans and prescriptions for life. So I love fiction and what it can do, where it can take you. My mom is always trying to get my dad to read more fiction. He mostly reads nonfiction and magazines, and I think she’s right that he is absolutely missing out. As a species we love to tell stories. We’ve been telling stories for millennia and will hopefully continue to do so infinitely. I like reading, I like watching movies, I like listening to music. So many stories to hear and share and dive into. I like hearing others’ perspectives on the world, on life, on whatever. It’s wonderful. I’ve read 20ish books this year and I love reading all of them, even if I read slowly.

I’ve gotta believe that each year can be better than the last, if we work on it hard enough. I’m kind of a curmudgeon and I get very pessimistic about things, though. I used to consider myself the “eternal optimist,” but I don’t think that’s been true for a long time. But I still like the idea of trying to stay positive and looking forward to things. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel itself is an interesting, liminal space, but it’s not where we’ll be forever. We have to emerge under the stars again sometime. I’m OK with that, living under starlight for awhile. <3