The scholar Richard Sennett once wrote, “modern capitalism works by colonizing people’s imagination of what is possible”. If it is the case that our current economic model thrives by creating the conditions that suppress rather than unleash the imagination, and if we recognise that now, more than any other time, we need a mass re-nourishing of the collective imagination, then where might we spot examples of ‘the economics of the imagination’?

If, as I’ve been recently musing, our imaginations need time and space, and much of that time and space is currently being sucked up by smartphones, social media and  our online lives, then what happens when people stop, turn these devices off, and deliberately make time to reflect? To explore the answers to this questio, I headed out to The Barn Retreat on the Sharpham Estate, close to where I live, to talk to Tasha Bassingthwaighte who is The Barn’s Manager.  I arrived just as participants in one of their week-long retreats were heading indoors for some fine-smelling soup. Tasha and I sat in The Barn’s library, and I started by asking her to explain what happens at The Barn.

“It’s about how the first step to slaying a dragon is for one person to say, probably drunk in a bar somewhere, “I bet it can be done, though”. These are the words of fantasy author Alexandra Rowland, whose novel ‘A Conspiracy of Truths’ was published late last year. The quote captures the essence of an idea, a genre, which she coined, called ‘hopepunk’. Fantasy and sci-fi is a world rich in different genres, but as soon as I read how she described what the term meant to her, I realised she had important things to contribute to our ongoing discussion about imagination, in particular to the question of how our storytelling can help to bring to life in the here and now the kind of future we want to create.

“It is very easy to think of the dystopian ideas. It’s almost lazy. Thinking of the good future is actually really hard because you have to vision something that is qualitatively different. Everyone knows what dystopia looks like. It’s also exciting, in a dramatic way. The reason that all these Hollywood movies and TV series and things are dystopian is that they’re interesting dramatically. We are all attracted to stories of disasters. When we do sessions with the public, even though we’re coming from a point of view of trying to get them to visualise the optimistic side, they still gravitate towards doing dystopian visions, and it takes a real effort to wean people off doing that”.