Season 4, Ep. 12 - The Future I’m Dreaming For Our Children
Every transformation in history started with someone brave enough to imagine what didn't yet exist. Are you being pushed by our collective problems, or pulled by a vision of who we could be, together?
If you've been searching for "how to stay hopeful about the future" or "collective healing and climate grief," this one's for you.
You'll learn:
Why the wellness industry has nailed individual manifesting, but we're desperately missing a collective vision for humanity
How to write your own vision of the future (and why it's more powerful than any action plan)
Why mamas and earth-lovers will be the ones leading this movement
The difference between toxic positivity and visionary courage, and how to hold both grief and hope at the same time
Why a vision helps us work backwards to design our lives today - to take the steps now to align with the future we see
The personal development world has taught us to manifest our dream lives, but what about our collective dream? In this episode, I invite you into a different kind of visioning: one that's communal, embodied, and planetary.
I walk you through my vivid, sensory vision of a regenerative future: fruit trees lining sidewalks, nature schools for children, community gardens, fireflies returning, and a slower, more connected way of life.
If you're a mother, an Earth lover, or someone navigating eco-grief and climate anxiety while desperately searching for something to hope for, this episode is a permission slip to dream bigger.
I'm drawing on the legacy of visionary leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to the women's rights movement, to remind us that every transformation in history started with someone brave enough to imagine what didn't yet exist.
This is your invitation to add your color to the collective painting of where humanity goes next.
Listen Now:
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2akpmmTCu4yav1huh4EcHs
Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-im-dreaming-for-our-children/id1498731180?i=1000761715016
Connect with Megan:
🌐 https://www.megandlambert.com
💌 https://www.megandlambert.as.me/discovery-call
Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
Take Back Your Mind podcast by Michael Bernard Beckwith
Eros & Earth episode: Fall in Love with the Future: Reclaiming Imagination in the Age of Collapse with Rob Hopkins
Solarpunk - Explore this movement through books and documentaries on regenerative futures
Michael Bernard Beckwith quote: "You're either pushed by your problems or pulled by your vision."
Explore the concept of seven-generation thinking from indigenous traditions
If you’re curious about my offerings, visit me at www.megandlambert.com.
If this episode moves you, please let me know by reaching out by email, Instagram DM (@megandlambert), or leaving a review!
Episode Transcript:
Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of Eros & Earth. This is about imagining our collective future. It really struck me yesterday as I was driving on my scooter in Bali that the wellness industry has gotten very good at individual manifesting. Manifest your dream life, chase your goals, live in your best life. But there's not enough conversation around what's our collective vision together. Where are we going?
as humanity as our more than human selves. Where do we want to go? Because it's also really easy to flip into doom and gloom and despair and neglect the beauty of what could be. So in this episode, I'm going to do a couple of things. I'm going to walk you through my vision of what I think the future that I want for my children, what I see for our children. I'm going to talk about why it's really important to do this kind of imagining yourself and
even better if you can with other people around you that also care. And then we're going to talk about other ways that this has shown up in history, how collective imagining has deep roots. And then we'll leave you with, now what? Now what do you do with all this information?
Okay, but first, you ready to hear my vision of the future? And know that this is like a creative, ongoing, imaginal art. So imagine if you wake up slowly to the actual daylight hitting your eyes and that before you even look at a screen, you look at the sun and you notice the season that you're in and you notice the weather. And if you're a mama, you take your kids
on a little walk to the local nature school where they can run around and learn about the native plants and trees and animals and learn survival skills, how to grow their own fruits and vegetables. as you're walking to this nature school, you realize, I forgot breakfast, but it's no problem because there's trees growing all along the sidewalks, fruit trees that are full of oranges and apples and all kinds of fruit. can just pick and eat.
And so you're eating this fresh juicy orange off the tree as you're holding your kids hands, walking them to this nature real life learning center place, forest jungle. And as you're walking, your body feels soft. It feels soft because in this future, so much of the productive, efficient work has been outsourced to AI.
which has left humans with so much more time and space for creativity and care.
AI has created so much efficiency that now there's universal basic income. So everybody has an income no matter what they how they choose to spend their days. And in that you've noticed this whole flourishing. Maybe you've taken up making sourdough bread or wildflower cards, or maybe you are making your own tables and chairs. There's this real rebirth of doing things with our hands, an analog life.
And because this universal basic income has covered everyone's basic needs, there's so much more space to sit down and talk to your neighbor, to take care of your parents, to spend a lot of time as a family. People just get to move more slowly in this future that I'm imagining. And as you're walking your kids to this nature space, the air is clean. It's so clean.
because there's almost no cars on the road. Most people are biking or walking. Everyone lives within walking distance of the major things that they need. Grocery stores, cafes, shops, the major things are all within walking or biking distance. So that means that cars are becoming increasingly rare. And electric cars, there's one electric car per neighborhood and everybody shares it and you can book in the time you need.
So it's a real sharing economy.
Let's see what else. on your way you pass a community garden where you and your neighbors have come together to learn about how to grow local herbs and fruits and vegetables. together you're working on this thing called food sovereignty, which sounds heady, but what it really means is you get to spend a lot of your time with your hands in the dirt learning about the cycles of earth and nature while you chat with your neighbors and your friends.
You can pick a tomato right off the vine and eat it with the juices running down your chin.
What else? You know, as you walk to the cafes, they've all just naturally gone more organic and regenerative because the economic system has shifted. Finally, the governments woke up and they realized, our whole purpose is to protect and serve life. So businesses that are harming people, planet, animals, species are penalized.
taxed, fined or closed and businesses that are supporting life, those get subsidized, tax breaks, benefits. And so by that incentive structure change, so many more businesses just organically become organic, just naturally want to align their business in a way that supports life. And it's become this really natural
growth of businesses that support life.
And then after your day playing in the garden, hanging out with your kids, moving slowly, making things with your hands, it's nighttime and all the outdoor lights are turned down or changed to soft amber because fireflies are back. Fireflies that delicate bio indicator that tells us if our soil, our air, our water is clean, they've started coming back.
And when you turn down the outdoor lights, you sit out on the deck with your kids and you see fireflies lighting the way again. And you feel this deep sense of hope. We did it. We did it. We were creative. We were resourceful. We were resilient. And we did it.
And that's the future I see for our kids.
So those are a few of the things that matter to me and a few of the things I see. My invitation to you, if you're listening to this, is to write your own vision of the future. Where do you want us to be as a society, as a culture, as a planet in 10, 20 years? Where do you hope that we are? Because what that does is it gives you a map, it gives you a road.
Without a vision, without a collective vision we can rally around, we are lost. We are lost in the dark. The thing about everyone in history that has made a difference has had a vision. Martin Luther King famously had a dream, right? And he didn't say, these are the practical shifts we need to make right now. He said, I have a dream. And people rallied around it. JFK says, we choose to go to the moon and then funding resources, incentives, teams, everything aligned behind that vision. The women's rights movement.
They had a dream that women were full, equal citizens, and they rallied around that before it became possible. And here's the thing about people that have the courage to dream. It will always seem idealistic and naive to somebody that is stuck in the way things are currently. But if you have the courage to be naive, to be idealistic, and to imagine something better, you are adding to where we go. Because where attention goes, energy flows.
And right now, a lot of our collective attention and energy is in doom scrolling, despair, rage at our institutions falling apart. And all of that's important, right? The rage and the grief is important. It is so valid. It makes so much sense. There is real pain and real trauma unfolding in the world. And we can't stop there. We can't stop there because if we do, we don't have somewhere to go. We don't have a North Star.
We're like a ship lost at sea, right? Facing these big waves, but we don't know where we're going.
So have the courage to have a North Star. Have the courage to think about what do you want for your kids, for your friends and their families? What do you want for your grandkids? What do you want for people's lives bigger than yourself? And that's the seed of the collective visioning. And then if you can do this with others, even better.
Yeah, you can tell I feel really passionate about this. If you haven't listened to that episode yet with Rob Hopkins, Around Imagination, it's a really good one and he's been a leader in this. There's so many movements coming together that are saying similar things. Like he calls it sensual futuring is one thread about like really viscerally imagining the future you want. Another thread is the solar punk.
There's some really cool solar punk books and documentaries about where we could go in the future. Yeah, there's so many different threads and ways, but I think the biggest invitation I have is just to think about it, right? It's just like if you're thinking about your own personal life, if you don't know what you want in your life, you don't know where you wanna steer your life, you don't know what you wanna create.
you will continue to do more of the same and wonder why you feel stuck. That's on the personal side.
And you know, the antidote to that personally is to get really clear on like, what is calling me? Where do I feel aliveness? Where do I feel turn on? Where do I feel like, ooh, the spirit wants me to go this way and to write it down and to get specific and to, to let it be a body led imaginary process. Because you know, everything I've created in my life, I first had to imagine it. I first had to imagine, what would it be like to live in Bali?
Yes. Okay. What would it be like to build a house with a living garden that looks so much like a garden? You don't even know you're on a rooftop. What would it be like to make a hub of regenerative tourism in Bali? All of these things were just ideas first and now they're in, they're coming to life. They're happening, but none of them happened unless you let yourself dream and imagine. So that's on the personal side. And then I think it's
It's really important and brave to think about that collectively. What do we imagine for our society and our future together?
And knowing the brilliance of doing this collectively is everyone will come from a really unique angle. So maybe you work in the energy sector and you have a really clear vision of how the energy sector needs to transform. Or you work in finance and you have a really clear view on what, how we need to tweak capitalism so that it serves life, not corporate interests. Or maybe you are deep in motherhood and you have a really clear vision of like the type of mothering that will raise the generation that we need.
or there's so many different, you're gonna come at it from different angles. Your vision will look different than mine. And that is beautiful because I think in a collective visioning process, it's like we're making a big painting together and everyone comes with a different color. And that's how you make the most beautiful painting. So my invitation to you as you listen to this episode is to put in the comments in the episode or you can DM me on Instagram.
But put into the comments of the episode, what do you see when you look out into our collective future? What do you want?
What do you want? What do you see? So much of the environmental movement has been really heavy and for good reason. There's a lot to grieve, you know.
When I look out in the future, sometimes I see like our oceans filled with plastic and sea levels rising and millions of people displaced and, you know, storms that destroy communities and heat waves. And those things are real. Right? Those are real. And those will happen. And what could we imagine alongside of that? That's even more beautiful and even more inspiring and we'll gather people around this vision.
Okay, let me see if there's anything else I wanted to say before I wrap up.
Yeah. Okay. This is a really important one. The difference between toxic positivity and visionary courage, toxic positivity ignores the harsher realities of what's unfolding. It ignores the institutions falling and social trust crumbling and the oil prices rising and the energy crisis. Right. Those are real. So we don't want to bypass that. We want to know about that. Include that.
and have the courage to go beyond that, to not stop there, but to keep imagining where we can go and to keep holding the vision as our North Star, as we're guiding our ships through turbulent, big waves, turbulent waters. Right? And to do that, you need to be able to metabolize a lot of grief and rage. And that's one of the biggest gaps, I think, is like, we don't have a lot of spaces to metabolize collective grief and rage so that you can
move through into the imaginary part. So that's one. The other one is a lot of the people listening to this podcast are mothers and Earth lovers and women. If you're not, you're welcome as well. But a lot of you are women. And I want to say that Earth loving women mothers have always led this conversation. You've always led this conversation.
In some of the indigenous tribes, they have a seven generation viewpoint. So whenever you make decisions, you have to think about seven generations ahead and how that will impact them. And I think there's something about being a mother where your body is tied into the next generation. You're literally growing the future in your body and then tending to the future through your family and through your children. So I think mothers are gonna lead this movement.
Of I'm biased because I'm a mother, but I do think mothers will lead this.
And then the other thing is when you once you have this vision, the amazing part is you can work backwards from there. So, for example, in my vision, like there were fruit trees along the streets. There was nature school that the kids went to. There was community gardens. These are all we walked and biked instead of drove cars. These are all things that already exist. Right. And so now that I know, okay, this is where I want my future to go.
I can start aligning my life and my actions today with the future I want to see. It's okay. I want to invest more in community gardens. All right. I want to make sure that we're living somewhere that's bikeable and walkable. I want to find schools that really connect my kids with nature. That's the power of a vision is when you can see it, you can move towards it. You can start to take steps today that align with where you want to be and start to shift habits.
So a vision, there's this great quote by Michael Bernard Beckwith that says, “you're either pushed by your problems or pulled by your vision.”
It's okay to have a little bit of both, honestly. You can be pushed by problems and pulled by a vision, but I will tell you from personal experience, it is much more fun to be pulled by a vision than it is to be pushed by problems. So let your vision pull you. Let it pull you into alignment today with the person that you're becoming and the world that you're creating. That's the power of a vision.
All right, is there anything else I really wanted to share with you? So passionate about it. No, I think that we think we got it. The invitation is, let's dream together. Let's make a vision worth creating. Let's make a future worth falling in love with. Let's get excited about what we can build together. And then from there, we can align our lives today in that direction. All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know in the comments what your future looks like. Let this be an ongoing conversation. And as always, if this touched you, if it moved you, please share it with a friend or a family member. All right, take care.