Another world is possible.
Is another world possible?
Another world is possible. It’s an expression I’ve used to underpin and guide my personal and professional work since sometime around 2010 when I first established what has come to be The Young Never Sleep studio.
Before I came to learn that the phrase is actually well known in circles of global policy to refer to the concept known as “alter-globalization”, I used the phrase to express my own intuitive sense that the world I currently inhabit was one of many that were potentially available to me. With time, I extended this notion beyond my personal experience, to include our sociocultural environment as a whole. The idea that this world, the anthropocentric, patriarchal, war-torn world filled with its myriad entangled inequalities, coercions and exploitations, was not the only one we were confined to. This notion of another world, of this possibility, came primarily from an appreciation for the beauty and tenacity of nature and secondarily, by the resilience of humanity.
Nature, in all its exponential wonder, had found seemingly infinite solutions to propel life forward. From the intricate architecture in the webs of spiders and labyrinthine ant colonies, to the emotional complexity of whale culture, nature has engineered flight, enabled bats to navigate with sound, given octopus the power to change the shape, color and texture of their bodies at will. Through evolutionary processes, nature has made thread stronger than steel, skin as transparent as glass, food from sunlight, made life possible in the oceans darkest abyss, the bitter cold of sub zero arctic ice, and even imbued some with effective immortality. Nature made what should be impossible possible.