It seems that for now, most people are trapped within certain familiar frameworks and habitual patterns of how life is supposed to be lived and what we can aspire to as humans. Most people want stable jobs and a mortgage which offers stability in terms of living situation.
Within certain spiritual discourses and spiritual communities, there’s often mention of the term co-creation and more generally a sense that this is a particularly important time where we will all need to learn how to work together more collaboratively and harmoniously.
I think this term co-creation has some important elements that need to be brought out in contradistinction from typical mainstream discourse. Broadly speaking, co-creation allows for an important degree of individualism and an important degree of collaboration. These two things are not pitted against each other but seen as important elements which need bringing together. I’ve sometimes tried to give some hint of how this could work when writing about complex systems and jazz: https://timmyfunnell.com/introduction-to-complex-systems-in-jazz/ This also brings out the idea that contradiction is often seen as a good or at least necessary thing in spiritual discussions. There’s a tendency, perhaps particularly in Anglo-American culture to see everything as being either this or that and arguably there’s a great benefit to seeing the world through the prism of and instead of or. “Nothing’s contradictory in this world, everything’s complimentary” as I’ve heard it said.
So the idea would be that you can have a group of people who work collaboratively together but by following their own interests, their own curiosity and their own intuition about where to direct themselves. And through that process, there’s the potential to create more interesting, surprising, complicated and unbounded results but which are potentially more messy, more unpredictable and less confined to the familiar. This is where jazz (or at least some types of jazz) comes in as a useful analogy and inspiration for how this kind of structure can work. Sometimes it’s discordant, unharmonious, unpredictable, chaotic and challenging but it’s also fun, liberating and potentially cathartic.
For now it’s hard to imagine how this kind of activity could become more typical in the future because we’re so bounded by financial challenges and rigidities, institutions and old fashioned ways of doing things. But if we were to dream a little about the possibilities of exciting futures perhaps we could imagine something like the following. A world where collaborative spaces were made available for people from different skills and knowledge backgrounds to work together. Where scientists, artists, academics, inventors, technologists but perhaps also from different professions such as care workers, health professionals, civil servants, policemen, or many others perhaps, could have a space to explore and experiment and collaborate together. Ideally, such collaborations would be given the freedom to explore the vast potentialities without being dragged down by the strictures of needing to fulfil particular outcomes. It might be necessary to learn to trust that activity such as this which allows such a degree of exploration and collaboration but also the possibility for individuals to stretch out into their full human capacities will have a positive impact on the world. At the very least through the improvement of psychological health/human flourishing of participants but otherwise through the creative discoveries and potential practical applications of those discoveries.
It could be too much to dream for now but at least some movements in that direction, of which there are already some, would be desirable.