This is our Tomorrowland.

I have recently found myself tumbling down a deep Retro-Futuristic rabbit hole. The genre feels so of the moment right now, with its brave, yet fragile nostalgia for a bright and shiny future. It was a movement of soaring optimism and concrete ambition that decried sentimentality and wiped history clean. It’s architects and artists promised us a magical destination that was sharp, clean, and unbelievably bright. NEW!! was the motto, and FAST!!! was the pace. And of course, everything was good.

We have all seen the posters, been to Tomorrowland, watched the Jetsons… there was a thrill to the concept of a fresh, crisply packaged utopia, where we had worked out the messy kinks of all this living. Where we had gotten it right.

Yet when I sift through these images, where time and space undulated at our command like Zaha Hadid’s buildings of glass and steel, it seems to be less a place than a frieze of movement, a frantic attempt to leap over the messiness of mortality. Human beings are depicted siloed away, sealed in bubbles, whizzing above the ground, unsullied, untouchable and safe. And looking back over the past decade, maybe we had arrived there. Perhaps what we were calling the present not so long ago (barring a few flying cars), was sort of an emotional Tomorrowland, before the pandemic closed that theme park down.

Minus the hum of all that movement, and the whirring of all those gears, we are just now starting to assess where we really have landed. So much of what we were frantically building was focused on function, instead of feelings. The what without the why. And what it has left us with, even barring the pandemic, is loneliness. Over the past 6 months, The New York Times has featured over a half dozen articles pointing out the unbearable loneliness of tween girls, disenfranchised young men, the elderly, the disabled, new mothers, and this week - middle aged moms. The UK has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to address this scourge. It is the original pandemic. And so it seems that all this time the high flying rocket ships we thought we had built for ourselves were simply bunkers with a view.

The Great Awakening, the Great Resignation, and the universal groundswell of deep nostalgia we are experiencing now all point to the same discoveries. We can’t out run or out build our mortality. The only way to win at this game is to revel in it. To experience all the tender rawness and realness that comes with being alive. Danusha Lameris, a favorite poet of mine, calls these small moments the ‘true dwellings of the holy.’ They give life the precious richness that makes us fight for one more moment, for one more day during illness, war and unrest. They are our biggest accomplishments. And I predict they will be the fertile bedrock for a bold new future - the one we are building right now.

This is our Tomorrowland. Who’s in?