Two Possible Futures — and the One We’re Responsible For
By sayra pinto
Nov 22, 2025
I’ve been sitting with a question that feels urgent for this moment:
What happens to us when we stop tending meaning?
And also:
What becomes possible when we treat the future as a relationship instead of a forecast?
I wrote two short pieces — twin timelines — to explore these questions across a millennium. One imagines the world without Poetic Futurism. The other imagines a world where relational practice reshapes the next thousand years.
I’m sharing them here because I believe we’re at a crossroads, and the choices we make right now will echo far beyond our lifetimes
Blog 1: A Millennium Without Poetic Futurism
What happens when meaning is never tended
Some futures fail quietly.
Not through collapse or catastrophe,
but through a slow thinning of the symbolic world —
the inner architecture that helps people make sense of themselves,
of one another,
and of the future they’re trying to enter.
This is the story of a millennium without Poetic Futurism.
A world where the frameworks for coherence never arrive.
A world where the emotional and symbolic field remains untended.
2025 — A recognition without a name
In this future, I sense the fracture.
I feel the exhaustion in people’s voices,
the way belonging is dissolving under political acceleration,
the quiet panic of meaning slipping out of reach.
But I never name it.
The words stay inside me —
true, luminous, unspoken.
My notebooks fill with fragments that never become a framework.
The era carries on without a language
for what is unraveling.
2139 — A mediator without a lineage
Amaru inherits my pages.
He recognizes the brilliance woven through them,
but without form,
he cannot shape it into method or practice.
He moves through civic work with great care,
bringing people together,
softening conflict,
calming rooms that don’t know why they’re breaking.
But he does not have the structure
to teach what he knows intuitively.
His influence stays local, personal,
unable to grow roots across generations.
2499 — A historian searching for a missing door
Nao studies centuries of futurisms —
Indigenous, Black, decolonial, relational —
all powerful, all necessary.
Yet she senses an absence:
a missing grammar for tending the symbolic world.
Her work becomes a search for something
she can feel but cannot find:
a way to repair the emotional architecture of public life.
But the language does not exist.
It was never written.
She dies knowing her society survived
without ever becoming whole.
3000 — A peaceful world without depth
Liyun inhabits a stable, ethical, technologically mature world.
People live long and safe lives.
But the interior world — the symbolic realm —
never deepens.
Her last insight is simple:
“We endured,
but we did not become coherent.”
The millennium survives.
But something essential never grows.
Blog 2: A Millennium With Poetic Futurism
How a small yellow card reshapes a thousand years
Some futures begin quietly —
not with declarations or strategy,
but with a moment of clarity
offered from the heart.
This is the story of a millennium with Poetic Futurism.
A future that grows from relationship,
meaning,
and the courage to name what others feel.
2025 — Antigua: The small act that changes everything
At the end of a long circle,
after hours of listening to people speak their grief,
their confusion,
their longing for direction,
I reach into my bag.
I take out a small stack of yellow cards
cut by hand the night before.
On one side:
The future is a relationship.
On the other:
What must we remember?
How must we relate?
What can we imagine?
What will we design?
I offer them quietly,
not as a solution,
but as an orientation.
People hold the cards the way you hold something alive.
This becomes the beginning of Poetic Futurism —
not an institution,
but a remembering.
2139 — A lineage forms
Amaru grows up with one of the yellow cards pinned above his desk.
He uses the four questions in mediation rooms,
community assemblies,
classrooms,
and spaces where people are trying to reorient.
Poetic Futurism becomes a living lineage —
not a doctrine,
but a practice of tending meaning
as a public responsibility.
2499 — Memory architects take up the work
Nao, a memory architect,
helps communities rebuild their symbolic worlds
after displacement, transition, and loss.
She begins every project
with the four relational questions.
By her era, Poetic Futurism infuses governance,
ethical AI,
education,
intergenerational planning,
and community design.
It becomes the emotional infrastructure
beneath civic life.
3000 — A coherent future
Liyun grows up in a civilization
that understands meaning as shared work.
Assemblies begin with remembering.
AI listens with care.
Children learn to tend the symbolic world
with the same seriousness as they tend the land.
In an archive, she sees one of the original yellow cards.
She places her hand over the glass and whispers:
“Thank you.”
Because by then,
Poetic Futurism has become
a quiet architecture of coherence
that spans a thousand years.
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