My favorite example I've read recently was a collection of short stories called A People's Future of the United States. Not all utopian, some were pretty bleak, but they all had something hopeful even if it was just a small act of joy or resistance. Shoutout to Borderlands in SF for the recommendation!
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Ok, what you need are realistic possibilities. I live in Norway and just had a daughter. I get 2 weeks off from work, paid, from arrival of the baby. My wife is now on mother's leave from her job, paid, for about a year, (there's math, but nvm), then I get paid parent leave for about 3-5 months when she is done. Kindergarten here costs about 200$ (US) per month, recently lowered from around 300$. All children have a right to kindergarten from they're a year old (simplified).
My dad just spent a month in hospital in Sweden. The total cost was 400$.
Universities here cost about 100$ per semester + living costs, which the state owned student loan bank offers at decent interests to cover, and if you pass your exams, 40% of the loan is turned into a grant.
I could go on. Main reason on my opinion is the Nordic model of labor organization, where the state, businesses and workers try to make compromise so that businesses go well, workers are well paid and the state mediates when necessary. There are issues of contention, it's not paradise, but it works quite well for quite a lot of people. Bernie has talked about the Nordic model for years. It's real, it works quite acceptably, and it can be yours.
First step, strong unions and politicians that support them.
Here in the US, racists would break this. If you help one black person who "doesn't deserve it", then angry whites would rather shoot themselves in the eye than let the program stand. Well, that's the angle that right-wing pundits use, anyway, and it's shown to be effective time and time again.
The Nordic model is good, don't get me wrong, but it's not ambitious enough to set as a target. Plus, by being a real thing rather than an aspiration, people will look at the real flaws in the system as proof that it isn't viable elsewhere. Ya know, like the xenophobia that people point to as the secret sauce of the Nordic model (not saying they're right, just pointing it out as an example).
Creating a holistic vision of a future you want and the steps needed to be taken to get there will get far more results than pointing to real but flawed existing systems that can be attacked for being "imperfect".
Isn't the left already seen by most people as crazy hippies who live in delululand?
At this point, "we should install more solar panels and waste less food" is seen as crazy hippy delusion by the American right.
If anything, the American Democratic Party has swung too far in the other direction, portraying itself as defenders of the status quo - even being willing to move further right - in order to avoid being seen as "crazy hippies".
Meanwhile, MAGA is a utopian movement - it wants to completely transform America in the image of an idealized Christian conservative past, and doesn't care what laws it has to break in the process.
The Democrats haven't been able to effectively challenge MAGA's utopian vision, because all they offer is a return to the status quo under Biden, and Americans are sick of that status quo. And the American left outside the Democratic Party has been so marginalized (mostly by the Democratic Party) that even mild "let's do things a little bit better" leftists like Bernie Sanders have no real voice in American politics.
It's not about being crazy hippies. It's about having a vision for a better America, a plan to carry it out, and the courage to fight for that plan even when people call you a crazy hippie.
I feel like wasting less food is a non-starter. Here in the UK they got rid of expiry dates on fruit and veg a while back to supposedly reduce food waste (read: sell shittier produce) and it's such an assault on the psyche.
Now I just assume they're all single use and toss em if I haven't just bought em, probably throwing away way more than I ever have before.
Are you talking about fresh fruit and vegetables? That sounds like you're wasting a lot - in terms of money, not just in terms of food. It's pretty easy to tell whether fresh fruit and vegetables are going bad (getting rotten, getting moldy, and so on), and if they're not going bad they're fine to use, whether there's an expiration date or not.
Which is to say, I don't think reducing food waste is a non-starter, but I do think it's a matter of bottom-up education and practice (for you, I think that would mean learning how to tell when fruits and vegetables are going bad, and being confident enough in your knowledge that you can feel secure eating fruit and vegetables you didn't buy recently) as much as it is top-down changes in policy.
Idk if they're "fresh" or not or what you even mean by that, they come from the supermarket? Not like a farmers bazaar or w/e.
I am simply not going to risk my health and well-being on guesstimates, I want expiry dates, so I can be safe in the knowledge that there's liability on the corpo that makes them that I can sue.
Any losses in money just aren't worth the health risk for me, I don't want to die from thinking maybe the onion smells just like an onion and not slightly stronger which is how I'm meant to know it's expired.
Plenty of stories of people who's judgement was good until it wasn't and confidence was high.
I will not, and cannot be """educated""" out of this because I'm well aware of what to look for for spoiled signs and my mind will not change. I used to have safety and comfort of outsourcing liability and now I don't, I will not accept that as a good or positive.
The only way I can be convinced is if you tell me why it's a good thing for me and more broadly the (marxist sense) working class as a whole, even so, in any environmental campaign it would be a non-priority compared to waste and emissions caused by the rich.
No amount of gaslighting by the rich and their useful idiot environmentalists will make me buy into this personal responsibility organic bullshit, nor agree to this downgrade of my living standards for no fucking reason at all. I'm not gonna pay for plastic bags to subsidize the wealthy bailouts so they can fly on private jets either. I take them and I use them once. Fuck the rich and their fucking oceans.
If we burn - and I say we absolutely should - we burn together, that's justice.
The cultural divide between you and I is so great that I don't even know where to begin to respond. I appreciate you sharing your point of view, at least.
Yeah I think there's no point in attempting discourse if you find it so alien. Thanks for being honest though, I do appreciate you just saying that instead of twisting my words or giving some half assed nonsense replh attacking aesthetics as so many do both here and on reddit.
the ml artistic fantasy wrapped in pseudo science accurately described as "rich utopian accounts"
been keeping you motivated since the shiny story was invented, and never worked once