Against Optimism: A Pessimist's Guide to Practicing Futures

Most futures work begins with the assumption that tomorrow is available to us. That with enough strategy, creativity, or capital, we can build something better than what came before. What if your intellectual lineage doesn't include optimism? What if you were trained to see power as persistent, systems as durable, and change as the exception rather than the rule?

I learned this early, before I was a futurist, before I was a designer. Back when I was an undergrad studying African American Studies at UC Berkeley. The frameworks I encountered there didn't revolve around disruption or innovation. They traced how power endures. How history repeats, not in circles, but in loops designed to keep some of us locked out of time altogether.

That was my first real exposure to Afro-pessimist thought. It offered clarity. It gave language to what I had always felt: that for many of us, the future wasn't simply unwritten, it was structurally foreclosed. You might recognize it by other names: critical theory, decolonial studies, feminist critique, queer theory. Any framework that starts with the assumption that the system is working exactly as designed—just not for everyone.

Years later, when I entered design and foresight, that training never left. The tools were sharp, the intentions good. Every visioning session felt like a performance of forgetting. Every innovation lab like an expensive form of amnesia.

The Optimism Industrial Complex

There's a machine running in every conference room where futures work happens. It churns out the same product: better tomorrows through better thinking. Innovation labs that cost six figures but refuse to study failure. Design sprints that prototype solutions without examining what broke. Strategy sessions where teams imagine abundance without naming scarcity.

This machine has a supply chain. It runs on forgetting. It requires participants to check their trauma at the door, to treat history as background noise, to believe that the right combination of sticky notes and good intentions can engineer away structural harm.

The optimism industrial complex didn't emerge by accident. It serves a function. It lets organizations feel innovative without being accountable. It lets teams feel visionary without facing the communities their previous visions displaced. It turns transformation into a product you can buy rather than a practice that demands everything.

If you've ever sat in a design thinking session and felt something was missing, if you've wondered why every solution looks the same, why every process skips the hardest questions, why every outcome benefits the same people, you're feeling the edges of this machine.

Many futures practitioners are salespeople for this machine. They facilitate workshops where abundance gets imagined without scarcity getting named, where solutions get prototyped without problems getting understood, where futures get built without examining who got left behind in the past.

This is avoidant. Real transformation requires truth-telling, and truth-telling requires staying with what hurts.

Afro-pessimism taught me to reject forgetting as a strategy. To look directly at the structures that produced our current conditions instead of rushing toward narratives that make us feel better. To ask not "How do we fix this?" but "What does it take to face what we've made?"

What Wake Work Looks Like

Christina Sharpe calls it "wake work"—the ongoing labor of staying with the truths that haunt us, of tracking the afterlives of what we'd rather forget. This becomes my method.

When organizations hire me to "reimagine," I start by asking what they've erased. Not what they intended. Not what they hoped. What they wrecked on the way to whatever metrics made them feel innovative. Last year, an impact investor wanted help rethinking their portfolio. I walked them through a map of extraction: the neighborhoods their capital had displaced, the founders they ignored, the metrics that dressed up harm as efficiency. One executive left early. Another kept nodding like it was a TED Talk. The rest just stared.

Someone finally said, "We focused so much on what we wanted to build, we forgot to look at what we were breaking." Exactly. That's the problem with vision: it's easy to look forward and miss what's under your feet.

When I run scenario planning, I insist we start with worst-case continuities. What if the system doesn't change? What if your intervention fails? What if the conditions that created this problem persist for another century? What if this "problem" is a design feature working as intended?

Many facilitators rush past these questions. I ask people to sit with them. You can't build anything real from a foundation of wishful thinking.

Futures As Survival Practice

The futures I care about aren't shiny or smooth. They carry scar tissue. They emerge through refusal, adaptation, the daily practice of making something from nothing.

Black people have been doing futures work for centuries, not because we believed the world would get better, but because we needed to survive what it was. We learned to imagine around corners. To prepare for the worst while holding space for something else. To build in the cracks of systems designed to disappear us.

This is futures work without the machinery of optimism. No conveyor belt of better. No assembly line of pre-approved solutions. Just the uneven, unsexy labor of staying alive and helping others do the same.

When enslaved people organized the Underground Railroad, they were engineering escape from an unlivable now. When civil rights organizers planned freedom schools, they were designing infrastructure that could outlast the system.

That's what I bring to my practice now. The discipline of staying present to what is while refusing to let that be all there is. The knowledge that you can't workshop your way out of structural violence, but you can build capacity to survive and resist it.

The optimism industrial complex promises that the right process will deliver the right future. Pessimism offers the discipline to work from what's actually here.

I choose pessimism.