Dreaming Utopias

I am a Trekkie. Always have been. Kirk was ok, but from Picard onwards I was all in. Together with my mother, I spent days in front of the TV watching Janeway, Sisko & Co. I’ve seen almost everything there is and even today the Star Trek series are still my argument for Prime and Netflix.

Utopias and dystopias

I was fascinated by two things.

1. the constant philosophical debate on the questions: What is “right”? What do values mean? The ethical weighing up of life, freedom, self-determination and influence. The solution was often not easy, but required a new perspective on the topic.
2. i was excited by the distant future that was drawn. A union of cultures that had largely overcome money and drew motivation and meaning from developing themselves, humanity and others, supported by technology en masse. Of course, not everything was fine in these narratives either - hierarchies, egalitarianism and, despite “unknown life forms and new civilizations”, there was little individuality or diversity. But the utopia that Gene Roddenberry created inspired my thoughts and made me curious. Much more than dystopias, be they zombie apocalypses, pandemics 😬 or alien invasions.

Technological: ✔️Menschheit: in Progress…

As we move into the future, technology is advancing at a rapid pace. Tablets are as normal in our everyday lives as they are for Jean Luc Picard, we can (more or less) talk to computers and communicate with the whole world at the touch of a button. And a lot has also happened under the hood: major advances in battery technology thanks to the e-car boom and quantum computers with immense potential. With Vantablack, we currently have the blackest black that absorbs 99.965% of incident light. The California Life Company (Calico - a Google sister company) is researching how we can live longer. With examples such as Atlas and Spot, Boston Dynamics is demonstrating the amazingly organic coordination of movement that is now part of the robot repertoire. iPhones and iPads now have a lidar system on board to scan the 3D environment in addition to top cameras. Autonomous driving is becoming even more robust and safer … You could be tempted to say: “It’s working for us.”

Technological development has long since left us humans behind in terms of speed. We are simply not that fast. Evolution has its own laws of development and time. We continue to seek food, protection, belonging and, more recently, meaning. For us, change needs a crisis or time… there is still room for improvement. However, a look at how we live together - be it in families, companies, communities or Facebook comment columns - shows that we have completely different issues these days than “developing ourselves and humanity and exploring new worlds”.

But the pressure is great! We are constantly being reprimanded or reprimanding ourselves: “Get out of your comfort zone! Change yourself! Move with the times! Be more agile! Do this! Do this!” - But all this takes time, which we don’t give ourselves. A guilty conscience is inevitable.

Federation air in everyday fuss

Of course, we don’t have to do anything at first. Not be agile. Not vegan. Not think about it. Let’s leave it as it is. Preserving the system. In all this everyday fuss, however, we rarely think outside the box. Instead, we focus on the hair in our pea soup and complain that there’s too little salt in it … or too much.

Lifting your gaze and dreaming a utopia for the future not only prevents a stiff neck and mental rigidity. Focusing on infinite expanses changes the mind and the moment.

We should think much more often about how we actually want to live. What utopia do we want for ourselves? And it doesn’t even have to be about a federation of planets. Let’s clean up on a small scale. With ourselves, in our context and in our companies. What do we want the future to look like? How do we want to work? What should our team relationships be like? How do we deal with our products and services? And in concrete terms. Simply scrape the yellowed company vision off the foyer wall and: dream. Expand the mind.

And before you know it… the first step towards the future has already been taken.