book review: imaginable
book review: imaginable
Jane McGonigal effectively outlines the necessity of futures thinking and how to be ready for any future that may come
The onset of the pandemic in 2019 caught the entire world by surprise, spreading fear, panic, helplessness, and surprise throughout communities around the globe. One group of people was insulated from this emotional rush — participants in a 2010 game simulation run by Jane McGonigal in which she invited people to immerse themselves in a world affected by a global respiratory pandemic. Participants in this simulation indicated that they weren’t panicking when crisis struck, having worked through their fear and anxiety when they imagined it years ago. They were ready to act.
In her book Imaginable, McGonigal makes the compelling case that by exercising futures thinking, all of us can avoid feeling helpless and caught by surprise in a world that increasingly feels as if it is spiraling out of control. Futures thinking can give you feelings of agency, control, and optimism for the future, leaving you with the belief that you can not only handle any complex future that ends up manifesting, but can thrive within it, mentally prepared to handle anything thrown your way.
This skill set is especially important and urgent today. With the multitude of crises we’re facing today, pessimism, burnout, fear, and paralysis are wreaking havoc on people’s psyches. McGonigal gives us the toolkit to transform these feelings into hope, faith, power, and optimism.
This book review is broken up into the following sections:
Background on futures thinking
Exercises to develop futures thinking
Taking action
My takeaways and thoughts
By the end of it, I hope that you’ll be both inspired to read the book in its entirety and be filled with the belief that you have an important role to play in building a future of abundance.
Background on futures thinking
When talking about “futures thinking”, I’m specifically referring to a technique called Episodic Future Thinking (EFT). Here’s how McGonigal describes it:
I want you to imagine yourself waking up ten years from today.
Take as long as you need to come up with a vivid and plausible image—of yourself, of the space that you’re in, and who might be with you.
Where are you ten years from today? What’s around you? What do you see, hear, smell, and feel? What’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up? What do you have planned for the day? How are you physically different in this future?
What did you see in your far future? Did you expect things to be more or less the same? Or did you fill your future with alternatives to how things are today? There’s no right or wrong answer. Just notice.
Did you picture a morning you’d like to wake up to? Or did you find yourself exploring possibilities that might be painful to encounter? Both are helpful forms of imagination—your positive and shadow side. Just notice which direction you went to first.
Most importantly, did you feel a difference in your brain and body as you stretched your imagination ten years into the future? For most people, the sensation of this activity is like reaching for something that isn’t quite there."
After you’ve made this new memory, something amazing happens: what was previously unimaginable to your brain is now imaginable. The next time you try to think about this possible future, a vivid mental image or detailed description will spring immediately to mind. You can use this new “memory of the future” to plan and prepare for the future much more effectively. You can revisit this memory whenever you want and examine how it makes you feel. Does it spark positive or negative emotions? These pre-feelings can help you figure out: Should you change what you’re doing today to make this possible future more or less likely? And because you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want. You can alter the details as your hopes or fears change, “or as you get more information about what your future might be like.
Scientists call this form of imagination episodic future thinking, or EFT. It’s the mental ability to transport yourself forward in time and pre-experience a future event. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. But EFT isn’t just thinking about the future; it’s simulating the future in your mind. It’s the difference between knowing that it’s probably going to rain tomorrow—a kind of “fact” or abstract thought about the future—and vividly imagining yourself in the rain, trying to pre-feel the rain on your skin, and using everything you know about what tomorrow might be like to make the scenario more detailed and realistic. EFT might entail picturing where exactly you’ll be when it starts to rain, what you might be wearing, who might be with you, whether you’re likely to be annoyed by the rain or delighted by it, whether you’ll rush to get somewhere dry or stroll leisurely through it, and so on.
There are 3 specific components of EFT:
Scene Construction - Build the future world that you’d like to imagine yourself within. As McGonigal says, “Before you can imagine what you’re going to do, feel, and say in this future, you have to know where it takes place, who’s with you, and what objects surround you.”
Opportunity Detection - Identify ways you’d fulfill your needs in the hypothetical future. Essentially, you answer the question “What do I want?”
Pre-feel Emotions - Once you’re more settled into the hypothetical future and have an idea of how you’d act, think through how you’d feel, whether positive, negative, or some mix of both.
There are several reasons to go through the process of EFT:
Mental well-being and creativity - Studies have shown that people who engage in EFT are more likely to feel optimistic, motivated, and in control of their future. There are significant benefits for people who suffer from depression and anxiety:
Depression affects people’s ability to imagine a positive future because they’re unable to imagine their future in any detail, affecting their ability to anticipate pleasure. EFT can help train people’s imagination to construct detailed scenes of a positive but plausible future, reducing symptoms of depression.
Anxiety causes people to think about negative futures in vivid detail, causing paralysis through fear. EFT can help people to remember both innate positive motivations that inspire them to act even when there’s a risk of a negative outcome and actions they already know how to take in the face of these fears, reducing symptoms of anxiety.
Behavioral change - People who can more vividly imagine their futures tend to make healthier choices driven by delayed gratification or a delayed benefit. This applies even when not imagining the desired behavioral change! Imagining anything makes you more likely to act in line with your longer-term goals.
Time spaciousness - Imagining futures many years into the future unsticks you from feeling caged by your current circumstances. It creates a sense of time-richness. We rarely think beyond weeks or months, but on a 5- to 10-year timeframe, we never feel rushed or constricted. This feeling of time abundance makes us feel more open-minded, creative, and open to experimentation with various skills or actions. McGonigal describes it as “[lifting] the ceiling of our imagination.”
Learned helpfulness - Recent research supports the hypothesis that before fight or flight, our core instinctive response in the face of danger is “freeze”. Any other response is only possible after we learn that we can act; that we can receive and give support to others. EFT stimulates the same region of the brain that is responsible for turning off the default “freeze” response, helping build an innate sense of “learned helpfulness”. This essentially means that we learn to believe in our own power; that we have confidence in our ability to problem-solve for ourselves and others.
Hard empathy - It is difficult to empathize with people who are dealing with something that we haven’t experienced ourselves; McGonigal calls this skill hard empathy. This requires taking an “imaginative leap” to try to understand others. EFT provides you with an additional library of simulated experiences that you can use to better relate to others, and research shows that this is beneficial both for individual and communal well-being.
Combats normalcy bias - Normalcy bias refers to the refusal or inability to plan for or react quickly to disasters or events that have never happened before. This largely explains our lack of preparedness for the pandemic, and this bias is responsible for a quarter of CEO firings. EFT practice combats this.
Exercises to develop futures thinking
The futurist Jim Dator stated that “any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous”. This is hard to do! It’s difficult to build effective future scenarios that truly stretch your imagination in this way. We’re all heavily biased by our set of experiences, and any scenario we create will typically reflect those experiences. However, this is a skill that can be built with practice.
To provide a starting point, McGonigal constructs several future scenarios throughout the book as EFT exercises. Here are a few:
Thank You Day - Every year, you’re given $2,000 from the government with the stipulation that you have to give away one-half of that sum to someone who’s listed on a national registry of eligible recipients (front-line workers, teachers, librarians, etc.)
Global Emergency Sperm Drive - As a result of declining fertility rates, scientists organize a worldwide sperm donation drive to build a global sperm bank that will only be used if the global fertility rate drops below a certain threshold.
Medicine Bag - You’re given a reusable tote bag that you can use once a week to fill with fresh produce free of charge from anywhere (stores, farmers markets, etc.)
Grand Challenge - Instead of declaring college majors, college students are tasked with picking a challenge that they will dedicate themselves towards (climate change, mental health, etc.) At colleges, you work with an interdisciplinary cohort that will work together on projects in the challenge area chosen.
Double Your Money - The federal government launches a digital version of the dollar, and you have the option to exchange your cash for double the amount in digital dollars. However, the digital dollars are not anonymous - they’re tied to biometrics, and the government will have access to all transactions.
In each scenario, we’re asked us to suspend disbelief for a bit and wholeheartedly go through the process of EFT. What are your initial reactions to the scenario? How do you feel in this hypothetical future? What courses of action would you take? The point of these scenarios isn’t they’re predictive of what will happen; they’re possible futures. They’re meant to evoke feelings of shock and surprise to stretch our minds. If they didn’t evoke those feelings, they wouldn’t be beneficial to reflect on.
Outside of providing scenarios for reflection, McGonigal also proposes the following exercises to improve your futures thinking ability:
Stump the futurist - Write down a few things that you’re 100% confident will stay the same 10 years from now. Afterward, research ways in which some of the things you wrote might be wrong. For instance, if you wrote down “children will require 2 biological parents”, after a bit of research you might stumble upon this news bit from 2016 describing the first baby born using the 3-parent technique.
100 ways anything can be different - Pick a topic (food, tech, etc.) Write down 100 things that are true about that topic area today. Afterward, pick a few and rewrite those facts to state that the opposite is true. Research things that are occurring that may make the opposite a reality. Here’s an example given about shoes:
FACT: Shoes aren’t free. People have to buy them. Perhaps in the future, governments or health insurance companies that want this kind of data would give away “smart shoes” for free?
FACT: Most people own more than one pair of shoes, different types for different occasions. Maybe over the next ten years, we will see a huge downward shift in consumption, possibly due to economic reality.
FACT: People take their shoes off when they go to sleep at night; they don’t sleep with their shoes on. Maybe in some parts of the world where extreme weather and climate risk continue to escalate, some of us live with a climate-related post-traumatic stress disorder? And just in case—as a symptom of our climate PTSD—we sleep with our shoes on?
Search for signals of change - Be on the lookout for real-life hints that the world is changing around you. Once you’ve identified or seen something that doesn’t quite fit into your model of the world, dig in further. A personal example McGonigal cites is when she saw a “No Drone Zone” sign at a local park, potentially signaling a future where drone usage is ubiquitous. This experience inspired McGonigal to research drone usage and get one for her family to improve their understanding.
Taking action
A consistent element throughout the book is the emphasis on your individual ability to take meaningful action. Each person has a unique intersection of skill sets, experiences, and interests. McGonigal proposes reflecting on the following to understand ourselves better:
Skills and abilities - What are you good at? What do you know that other people don’t? This isn’t your resume; this can be your hobbies, something random you’ve learned, etc.
Deep knowledge and passions - What topic or activity do you know more about than others? What have you spent a lot of time thinking about?
Communities - What communities are you a part of? What groups are you a member of? (Neighborhood associations, workplaces, schools, etc.)
Values - What are your core values?
We’re pushed to reflect on where our personal background intersects with the larger forces shaping our future to not only identify but prepare for the role we can play in the potential futures to come. This level of reflection helps us be both reactive to possible futures that may arise and proactive about aligning our time and effort towards helping people in the areas we’re most passionate about.
Reactive action - For each future scenario described in the book, we’re asked to reflect upon these three questions: What will people need in this future? What kinds of people will be especially useful in this future? How will you use your unique strengths to help people in this future? These exercises build the belief that we can meaningfully act in any future that may arise, creating self-confidence and a bias for action.
Proactive action - McGonigal asks us to list trends that will have the most influence on our individual lives. My list includes the mental health crisis and increasing social isolation, climate change, declining religiosity and spirituality, the development of artificial intelligence and the automation of work, and widespread polarization and radicalization. Once you have your list, don’t worry and just focus on identifying one thing you can do to help one person affected by this force. For example, to better prepare herself to help during the mental health crisis, McGonigal enrolled in an online psychological first aid course. Small steps are meaningful in and of themselves, and they have the potential to snowball into larger opportunities in the future.
McGonigal argues that consideration of the future is essential and beneficial even in the face of lots of problems in the present day:
“For young people in these communities, being able to think about the future is a way to break out of what often is a limiting reality,” he told me. “Limited expectations, low self-esteem, and maybe limited options too. Looking ten years out helps them imagine alternative scenarios. It allows them space and creativity, more liberty and freedom to imagine who they might become, as well as maybe to analyze who they are today.
One young woman who participated in the Colombia game described EVOKE as ‘a bridge between what I thought my limitations were and what my potential could be.’ And I do think it’s a way to illuminate opportunities for action, to make a bridge between these grand challenges that seem insurmountable and overwhelming and impossible for one individual to tackle, to helping people feel they are the kind of person who can actually get out and address these problems.
Overall, it’s less about assessing and projecting the most urgent problems to solve. That is a pathway that will lead us to burnout, fear, and paralysis. Instead, our focus should be on identifying our own unique way of impacting the future and helping the people around us. We each have tremendous power. We just have to tap into it.
My thoughts and takeaways
I absolutely loved this book. It echoed many ideas that I had already been contemplating while applying them in a whole new context:
Mental simulation is powerful - EFT is essentially mental simulation and visualization applied in a specific domain, considering the future. Significant scholarly research has shown that visualization is a powerful practice that can change your brain, and it’s an important component of my routine. The stoics also have a mental simulation exercise called Premeditario Malorum which is the practice of visualizing everything that could go wrong in our lives and then thinking about how we’d handle it and maintain calm in the face of extreme adversity. Regardless, this book made me an even deeper believer in the power of mental simulation, and I’m excited to add EFT as another tool to develop my brain differently.
Experiences shape our beliefs - Morgan Housel has written a lot about how each person’s beliefs are shaped by their experiences. For example, someone who has not experienced the fear of not making their next rent payment cannot understand the belief systems of someone who’s had that experience. With EFT and scene construction, McGonigal gives us a set of practices for building a library of diverse experiences and feelings that give us a much greater capacity for empathy and transformative action. Our feelings more than our rationality shape our actions, so giving us the greatest library of how we'd feel in different situations helps us anticipate future actions and be prepared.
Future forces - I’m a believer that the future will be shaped by the intersection of a variety of trends and forces affecting our world, and they can only be understood if we avoid getting caught up in the noise of the present moment. This book takes a novel approach to reinforcing this idea; it asks us to reflect on situations that may seem absurd or impossible, and then question how the intersection of future forces may make such a future reality possible.
Career planning - Recently, I’ve become so uninterested in playing the career management game. I have no desire to gain certifications or degrees to get senior positions at corporations; I want to just do my own thing. I was struggling with figuring out how else to focus my time and attention, and McGonigal’s ideas and exercises gave me a playbook to do just that. I’m excited to get to work creating my own path.
Optimism - At least in my circles, there’s a high degree of pessimism floating around. I think this partly has to do with our human bias towards pessimism and reacting negatively to change, and change is happening faster than ever due to the degree of globalization and interconnectedness in the world. Things are happening so fast that they seem like they're spiraling out of control giving us little chance to keep up. However, after reading this book, I was filled with a sense of optimism and hope, that no matter what happens in the future, we will continue to tap into our capacity to hope and dream and support one another to turn our world into a world that mitigates our worst excesses while bringing out our best. It may not end up looking how we currently want it to, but that doesn't mean that we still can't end up thriving. I'm a huge believer that no matter what happens in the future, we'll still maintain the capacity to hope and dream and find deep fulfillment and happiness. This book reinforced that faith.
Yes, there are a lot of scary things happening in the world right now. We constantly hear stories of horror, pain, and injustice, but there are a lot of people who are working really hard to prepare us to thrive no matter what future ends up manifesting. There are so many reasons to hope, and we can be ready to make the best out of whatever emerges.
I hope you now see that it's not inevitable to feel hopelessly out of control in this world; it's a choice. The ideas put forward in this book will make you feel more and more empowered to choose to abandon the feeling of helplessness and start taking action. Because no matter what ends up happening in the future, every single one of us has the potential to thrive and make a positive impact on our communities and the people around us.