I woke up less than an hour ago. Groggy on the bus. Going to class. Boring. Girl in front of me black fluffy coat and high ponytail. I know I shouldn’t but I do catch myself looking at other people’s screens most days. She’s looking at flights from Dublin to Seoul. Huh. She has to google translate what a cabin luggage is. I wonder how long she’s been here, how much time she’s had to hate and love the place already. I’ve been trying to find a pretend version of the country I can live with, knowing that I still have a life left for me to pick up as soon as I head back home.
Whenever I imagine my own future, I keep building it in the vague silhouette of my mother.
Wild garlic (Allium Ampeloprasum L.) ca. 1900–20 From Wild Flowers of Palestine
An immigrant woman who gave up a career that could have been brilliant because children happened (because I happened). But here’s the thing: I’m not an immigrant. Not really. Sure, I wasn’t born here, but I have enough passports to survive at least two collapsing nation states and still have one left over for brunch. So how much of this identity, this high melodrama of sacrifice and displacement is just a convenient narrative I’ve inherited? A myth we polish, rehearse, and deploy whenever we need to justify why our struggles feel legitimate.
And that’s the thing: class has become its own cult, complete with ritual self flagellation and a very flattering origin story. We recite our hardships like prayers, we polish our traumas into credentials. Anything to prove we deserve our seat at the table (preferably one with mismatched ceramic mugs; dishwasher safe, obviously).
Open air ceramic shop. Herbert Geddes.
When I picture my version of the utopia the aspirations are so awfully tame they don’t look like anyone had to fight for them at all. Pathetic. A house. A kitchen that gets morning light. Mugs, lots. Basic domestic serenity dressed up like a revolution. Maybe that’s the secret all activists hide behind their megaphones: the angry activist only dreams of not needing to be angry anymore.
The end of all this noise. A life where the struggle finally goes quiet.
But try bringing this into a political debate and watch it die instantly. Utopia does not stand on its own two feet. It has the posture of a newborn deer: cute, trembling, destined to be eaten. The only way to convince anyone that your soft little dream matters is to deliver it with charisma so blinding it might as well be a cult. The shiny promised future starts sounding like a bad pickup line. Nobody falls for that in their first debate. Optimism is naive for you. For me too.
Survey of the Smithsonian. Thomas Smillie.
And yet we keep asking the same question: how should an activist feel? Furious? Hopeful? Disappointed but moisturised? The reality is, activism today is a tug-of-war between utopia and rationalism, imagination and feasibility, the dream and the spreadsheet. We’re told to be realistic, but realism has a body count. We’re told to be hopeful, but hope can feel like a luxury.
Maybe the real tension isn’t between utopia and rationalism at all, but between what we’re allowed to want and what we’ve convinced ourselves we deserve. Between the world we fight for and the one we quietly settle for. Between the girl in the fluffy coat googling “cabin luggage” and the version of me who pretends my future is built on sacrifices that were never actually mine.
Maybe the cult of the reasonable ending is the final boss. The voice that whispers: stay pragmatic, stay polite, stay grateful. Don’t dream too big. Don’t want too loudly. Don’t dare imagine a future that isn’t neatly cost benefited and civil service approved.
But what if activism doesn’t need to choose?
What if utopia and rationalism aren’t enemies but co-conspirators? One dreaming, one building. One reaching, one grounding. One angry, one tired. A double act, not a duel.
Maybe the revolution really does start with brownies that taste like fudge and a bus ride to class. With a girl translating luggage sizes. With a future that looks suspiciously like your mother but quietly diverges from her sacrifices. With soft aspirations that don’t apologise for not being radical enough. With a utopia too gentle to win a debate but stubborn enough to keep haunting you anyway.
Because at the end of the day, the cult of the reasonable ending only wins if we let it. And I, for one, refuse to let my utopia be something I’m embarrassed to want. Even if all it contains is a house, a window, and mugs that match only by accident.
