Willow Berzin’s Vision

I’m a mother to a young son, and a designer creating new pathways for better ways of being and doing. I’m also one of the people behind building the Coalition of Everyone. My cultural heritage is a mix of Polish, Jewish, Latvian and Cornish.

I wake up in early summer 2040, and first notice a deep sense of peace. Apart from birdsong, it is quiet and there is stillness. I walk outside my house and down my street, there isn’t much traffic and nature is thriving everywhere. The light is soft and golden. Mostly, we are pedestrian now, and the central road is for electric bikes and electric public transport, electric self-driving cars are used minimally. Our city planning and buildings are intertwined with plants and trees, the designs of which are quite simple and beautiful, designed and built in symbiosis with nature.

The skies are clear, quiet, the air clean, people go about their errands without rush or panic. Every patch of earth has been given over to regenerating nature, incidentally ourselves along with it. Pollution, waste, road rage and GDP are things of the past. Local modes of living, decentralised energy and power, distributed self organising networks, community, purpose and belonging: these are the fibres for which we spend our time and energy harvesting and weaving. We exchange a lot of what we grow in our gardens and streets to eat with our neighbours. Long lunches on long tables in backyards with friends, neighbours and family abound as regular ritual.

We live very different lives now to before the pandemic, we spend far more time simply being than doing. We have a hyper-global awareness, while living and acting in a hyper-local manner. The news headlines for the day? Polar bear numbers are healthy this arctic winter. I take heart that the hard work we did in the 2020s was all worth it.

Looking back to now, it was the Great Transitioning decade of the 2020s, accelerated by the Great Pause, that catapulted us through the pandemic and into a better, safer, thriving and regenerative world. It led to a rapid and turbo-charged Renaissance in Humanity. As we turned our backs on the old toxic ways, we connected more deeply with who we really are, with ancient/new ways. People now choose to embrace interests and passions as a way of life, what were once considered “hobbies” are now a means for gainful employment in the new economy. We redistributed wealth and power and have universal basic income, free education, health and childcare as basic human rights.

We no longer live under constant existential threat or weaponised fear, fuelled and inflamed by the void filling illusions of the now defunct capitalist experiment and over consumption. Our central nervous systems are relaxed, our discontent quelled, our ways of thinking, knowing and being chilled right out. Old paradigms of poverty, inequality, injustice, debt and ecocide are things of the past. There is still much healing to be done, but the early 21st century feels like a millennia ago. We look back at our recent history as if waking up from a dark age.