Sunflower Seed: On Imagination
This is an archived post from Substack from Feb 24, 2025
Sunflower Seeds are short-form thought pieces where I either supplement a previous article or I simply write whatever I feel like without too much interrogation into my personal anecdotes. These may be half-formed or underbaked, but I welcome anything that grows out of them :)
Among my circles, I’m famously obsessed with utopias. I’m less so concerned with their theoretical descent into dystopia, but moreso the ways in which we can envision something different from what we have. But Florence, what’s the point if we always end up in the same place? You might say. Well, my imaginary pessimistic friend, how do you know for sure?
The trouble with these thought experiments, perhaps, and its depictions in media, is that we are always confined by the limitations of our world. Everything is referential. If 1984, a story meant to capture a snapshot of a far worse future, were to be written for the first time today, what would we envision? Without the existence of 1984, Brave New World, and Handmaid’s Tale, what would be the story of modern speculative dystopia, untouched by all those before it? (And yes, I definitely need to read more depictions by racialized/queer authors, but I make my point from the position of what I perceive to be mainstream thinking.)
“Well, we’ll never know, so why are we talking about these pointless rhetorical questions?” My imaginary friend might say.
But that’s precisely my point. When we are entrenched in our personal dystopian imaginings, coloured by our experiences, our environment, or specific consumption and entrenchment in our ideas, how do we imagine something different? In a way, this was exactly the thesis of 1984. Spoilers ahead for a 76-year old piece of media: in the novel, we follow the highs and lows of Winston’s journey—from paying attention to the unsettling feeling he has, to finding little ways of resisting the regime. He falls in love with Julia against the wishes of the state, and together, they imagine futures away from Big Brother. They make promises to never betray each other, to hold onto these ideals, but they are betrayed and caught, and the state beats the ideals out of them (to put it lightly). At the end of the novel, Winston and Julia pass each other on the street, and they go their separate ways. Everything they’ve ever dreamed up disappears, and the status quo stays intact.
What I seldom hear folks talk about in passing comments about 1984 is the proles. All of the main characters in 1984 work for the system and within the system—they’re responsible for the script, to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s terminology once more. Yet, 80% of the population is made up of proles—the people. Though there is fear, there are whispers of resistance. Though the Party believes them to be too inconsequential to be a threat, the narrator says: “If there was hope, it lay in the proles.” Indeed, I think everyone overlooks the ability of the people to make change, especially against giants like Big Brother. Our ability to dream often feels diminished by the perceived reality that there’s no winning against the script.
At the same time, dreaming is how we survive.
I now present a totally original, non-referential vision of utopia: a world in which the only vehicle that exists is the 1965 Peel Trident. Just kidding.
The problem is not that we need to be original—it’s that our attention is stolen by our entrenchment in western mythologies, and we are obsessed with the ways we can backslide into dystopia before we can even climb out of our current one. I think there is, in fact, a great many people out there dreaming up worlds, including actual, tangible possibilities that we can transition into (almost as easily as we are slipping into The Handmaid’s Tale). There is a collective desire to press a reset button—to recreate systems that upholds the dignity of all people. This too is referential: these desires come from activists on the ground, identities in the margins, and passed down to the way all of us feeling something not quite right in every cell of our bodies. It’s easy to see all the ways in which the world is wrong; it’s harder to see a way out of it.
Hope Tala’s chorus in “Survival” is something that has been stuck in my brain for some time:
Acting like we're fine, when we're walking a tightrope Start losing our minds, trying to break the cycle And sometimes you cry, while you're holding the high note And that's what I know of survival (that's what I know of survival)
There is a really interesting juxtaposition in each line between something abstract and something tangible. There is the action and the aspiration, and there is the pain etched into it like a Rorschach test. To me, the line “sometimes you cry, while you’re holding the high note” speaks to the many intangible feelings that make survival feel so difficult in today’s political climate. A high note denotes a level of self-induced asphyxiation and a kind of epic climax to a story at the cost of one’s well-being. I think of, for example, the momentary headiness of trying to hit the battle cry in “Defying Gravity,” and secretly trying again and again to embody even a fraction of Cynthia Erivo’s talent and presence. While “Survival” is ostensibly a meditation on intergenerational trauma, I think similar tensions exist when we think about what it takes to imagine better futures—breaking cycles, so to speak.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum published a short 5-minute read on an imagined utopia/dystopia where nothing is owned and privacy is dead. Every imagining is of course limited in some way, and I would be curious to know how the author might engage with this utopia in 2025, where ownership has risen to the highest level of the government while theft of intellectual property runs rampant, and privacy is dead anyway. The most telling part of this essay, in my opinion, is the comment section, where a majority of white men (in their profile photos) detail all the reasons why the author, a member of the Danish parliament, Ida Auken, is an idiot and without ownership, there would be no meaning. There is, from what I gathered, an intrinsic value in suffering within the bootstraps mentality, and perhaps that is the at the core of white trauma and white masculinity.
I came across Auken’s article through Andrew Sage’s overview of the library economy theory, which I’m obsessed with and highly recommend the multi-part breakdown of how it could work on the Srsly Wrong podcast. What Auken’s naysayers assume is that if there is no suffering—if all our needs are met—people would become lethargic and innovation would be dead. This is a common assumption of people within all industries, but by my observations, is true most of all within the helping professions and the non-profit industrial complex. There is this insidious pessimism that assumes the worst of people, and this increasing inability to imagine worlds outside of one’s own. The library economy theory changes this paradigm by illustrating the ways in which societies would actually thrive without ownership. Without money and the grind, people would have the freedom to fully explore their creative, intellectual, intrapersonal, and interpersonal pursuits.
I know much of this still sounds wildly idealistic, but it’s not impossible. In fact, I know it’s not impossible because I’ve seen first-hand how communities of care can look like. When I was unhoused, my friends took me in. When I couldn’t fight anymore, my friends rose up. I’ve seen food, labour, and love shared so freely. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about free fruit stands and gift economies in The Serviceberry, and all that the world has to offer without cost. I think even the smallest shift in paradigm, the smallest efforts to grow our hope in others, can cause a ripple effect in toward the worlds we want to see.
I know in many ways, I’m very, very lucky, which has grown my capacity to dream. I hope to pass some of my imagination onto you, and that I might someday gain the wisdom of yours in return.
Is that enough? I think it has to be for now.
Stay cozy, wherever you are.