John A. Sweeney, Jose Ramos, and Steven Lichty
Abstract
Three American-born futurists—now expatriates living in Australia, Kenya, and the UAE—gather to reflect on a synchronicity of loss: the recent deaths of their fathers and the simultaneous decline of the American hegemony they left behind. Through a reflective trialogue, this article explores the “geography of disorientation” inherent in both personal and geopolitical grief. Drawing on the framework of “triggers and tethers,” the authors examine how triggers collapse us into old selves while tethers pull us toward who we are becoming. Following Machado de Oliveira’s (2021) call to hospice modernity, they posit that the decline of the US is not merely a political event but an embodied trauma—an empire with failing organs, unable to imagine a dignified release. The article interrogates what “ancestral gifts” might be salvaged from the American experiment (second chances, civil rights traditions, multicultural solidarity) while refusing the myth of exceptionalism. In response, the authors propose “fractal futures”—replicable, community-based sense-making processes rooted in Freirian popular education and grief-informed practice. A Causal Layered Analysis unpacks the inquiry across four levels, from the litany of decline to the deep myths that structure our experience of loss, offering transformed metaphors: the seedling in the cracks, the kitchen reconvened, the cemetery of futures we consciously choose not to resurrect.
Keywords: Post-hegemonic futures; Grief-informed foresight; Causal Layered Analysis; Hospicing modernity; Embodied futures practice; Participatory futures
It is said that all good parties happen in the kitchen—the space of convening, of sustenance, of the best fights, and of the most honest conversations. This exchange was born around a metaphoric kitchen table: three American-born futurists, now dispersed across Melbourne, Nairobi, and somewhere in between, gathering online to make sense of a strange synchronicity. Within a short span, we all lost our fathers. And we all mourn the loss of America—a country that once represented the future, now collapsing into memory.
For us, the kitchen table has been overturned. We find ourselves in a liminal space, tasked with hospicing our American identities while trying to birth a future that does not yet have a name.
Fathers as Triggers
We use the language of triggers and tethers throughout what follows. Triggers collapse us into old selves—childhood memories, helplessness, confusion. Tethers pull us toward who we are becoming—toward responsibility, courage, and a different relationship with power. Our fathers, like our nation, leave us contradictory legacies. The work is to choose which strands become inheritance and which become compost.
For one of us, the death itself was mercifully swift—ten weeks from brain cancer diagnosis to a peaceful passing at home, surrounded by family. “In some ways, my father’s death was easy,” he reflected, “though death is never easy.” The harder part was the context. Having left the US permanently a decade earlier, returning felt like visiting a patient on hospice—stumbling forward, unstable, dangerous. On the day of his father’s funeral, the US bombed Iran. Mourning merged with rage and numbness at a state that continued to enact its power through distant violence, even as its own institutions frayed. The grief became double-exposed: ashes placed in the ground, and an empire that refused to accept its own limits.
For another, a historian-father is both blessing and trigger. A community college professor who immigrated at eight years old, he credited the opportunities of the Civil Rights era with his success while teaching the unvarnished history of American imperialism. No ifs, ands, or buts—if you read history, you know it. The foundational story he passed down was Martin Luther King’s arc bending toward justice. That arc was the promise. “I still partly believe in it,” his son admits, “even as I watch racial dog whistles, nativist politics, and billionaire-backed oligarchy shred the narrative. It hurts almost every day.”
For the third, a father carried Vietnam inside him. Drafted into a war he did not choose, he spent years pushing the experience away until PTSD emerged as a recognized diagnosis and gave him language and community. He vowed never to vote for an American president again after Nixon. His eventual reclamation of his veteran identity—and the lasting psychic damage of that war—make it impossible to separate personal grief from the longer arc of US militarism. From Vietnam to Fallujah to Gaza.
Empire on Hospice
Johan Galtung and Immanuel Wallerstein have mapped how great powers enter phases of overreach, internal fracture, and intensified violence as they cling to supremacy. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021) extends this insight, arguing that modernity itself—built on colonial extraction and delusions of separation—requires hospicing: the difficult work of sitting with dying systems without rushing to fix, save, or replace them. The metaphor of a patient in hospice fits the current American moment with uncomfortable precision.
“It’s on hospice,” one of us remarked, “and it doesn’t have a do-not-resuscitate order.” An empire with failing organs, hooked up to military and financial life support, unable to imagine a dignified way to let go. “Part of me wants to pull the plug. But you don’t pull the plug on nations. They stumble along.”
This stumbling feels deeply personal, a betrayal of an inherited story. For the son of a community college professor who taught the unvarnished history of American imperialism, the foundational belief was in Martin Luther King’s “arc bending toward justice.” That arc was the promise. “I still partly believe in that arc,” he admits, “even as I watch racial dog whistles, nativist politics, and billionaire-backed oligarchy shred the narrative. It hurts almost every day. My progress-direction hit the rocks.”
The shredding of that narrative comes from its very weaponization. As Zia Sardar observed, “one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.” The multicultural promise—which remains the only true promise of America—feels broken precisely because it has been twisted to serve an imperial project. The American dream has been rendered meaningless. This is the great contradiction: the US as a home for the displaced, for “the Somalis who fled to Detroit and Minneapolis,” while simultaneously being a state built on slavery and dispossession, whose slow demise “might benefit much of the world.” We are mourning a dream and a nightmare all at once.
Watching the Domestic Violence from Abroad
Living abroad, as Jeremy Rifkin argued, can intensify an “empathic stretch,” where our mirror neurons fire in response to others’ suffering. The distance creates a strange, painful clarity. “We’re watching the United States and seeing a domestic violence incident,” was how the feeling surfaced in our conversation. “It’s incredibly painful. Ongoing. And there’s this powerful feeling of helplessness. You can’t call the police, because the police are the ones doing the beating.”
The metaphor is chilling because it fits. The very institutions that might once have mediated conflict are now often its perpetrators. Our bodies mirror the trauma we see, whether in the streets of Los Angeles or Gaza’s rubble. Distance may create abstraction—we are not the ones sheltering from drone strikes—but it also amplifies shame and moral injury. We inhabit countries entangled in US foreign policy, working alongside colleagues whose communities are living with the consequences of decisions made in Washington.
This produces what we might call expatriate dissonance: relief at having left mixed with a lingering, almost filial loyalty to a country that feels increasingly unsafe to love. We are products of the systems we critique—public education, community colleges, relatively open borders (for some), career opportunities in futures work. To deny that would be dishonest. But to ignore the current reality—domestic violence extended across the world through tariffs, sanctions, and bombs—would be equally dishonest.
Our bodies register this contradiction before our theories do. The work is to become literate in these embodied signals—not to pathologize them, but to treat them as data about what futures our nervous systems can and cannot tolerate.
Tethers and Ancestral Gifts
If triggers show us where we still hurt, tethers show us what we are called to protect and extend. The question is what to carry forward as a post-hegemonic inheritance.
The answer isn’t found in grand narratives, but in tangible gifts. “The US is a second-chance place,” one of us insists. “Community colleges, land-grant universities—people genuinely had another shot at dignity. I’m a product of that. So is my father.” This institutional promise of a second chance is an ancestral gift, one hard-won by the civil rights organizers who pushed America closer to its stated ideals.
That same spirit is found not just in institutions, but in neighborhoods—in the small, relational acts that give multiculturalism its meaning. It’s in the memory of an old white couple in Inglewood who “didn’t leave when all the whites left—they stayed with their Black neighbors.” This is the tether. “That multiculturalism, that melting pot, was about who you share your lawnmower with. Not where you’re posting on TikTok about some hot spot with a ‘cosmopolitan vibe.'”
We choose to carry these tethers forward: the commitment to second chances, the courage of organizers, and the simple, grounded togetherness of a functioning neighborhood. At the same time, we refuse to inherit the fantasy that one nation can be the “city on a hill” for the world. Our tethers now point toward futures where dignity is not contingent on empire’s benevolence.
Fractal Futures and Popular Education in the Ruins
We find ourselves in what one of us called “the golden age of bad scenarios.” There’s more interest than ever in strategic foresight, yet so much of it is confined to elite institutions running dystopian drills while the public is left with anxiety and disinformation.
The antidote cannot be another top-down plan. “The resistance has to start with sense-making,” another argued. “We need a Paulo Freire-esque approach to futures—popular education that helps communities interpret what’s happening to them in non-ideological, common-good terms.” This isn’t about being anti-market; it’s about being anti-oligarchy. It’s about helping people make sense of a system that feels rigged.
This work must be replicable, adaptable. The idea of Fractal Futures emerged in our conversation—a model where communities can say, “That’s the process we use for sense-making here,” providing simple guidelines and letting it replicate organically. It’s an inherently intergenerational task. We are the glue between generations who made sense of their world through civil rights marches and Vietnam protests, and those who will do so through TikTok and neurodivergent-friendly organizing spaces. There’s a sense that we are “almost tasked with the sense-making of the sense-making,” translating between these worlds.
Large-scale theories of empire help locate US hegemony as one phase in a longer cycle. But structural diagnosis is not enough. Communities also need embodied and relational tools to metabolize what it feels like to live inside a system that is both harming others and losing coherence. Popular education in futures must be as much about emotional literacy and grief as about geopolitical literacy.
When Futures Die
Our colleague Juli Rush writes that our futures are always dying and always being born, and that futurists often find themselves “sitting bedside” as people hospice their imagined futures. The metaphor draws on lessons from death and dying, trauma, and care work.
Each of us arrived at this conversation carrying the death of our fathers and the slow death of an empire-shaped future. Some futures were small and intimate: weekly phone calls that will never happen, meals that will never be shared, reconciliations that will never unfold. Others were grand: the belief in an America that might gradually align its actions with its rhetoric.
Treating these losses as real—not just as intellectual disappointments—changes the work. Futures are not just scenarios on a whiteboard. They are woven into our identities, our nervous systems, our attachments. When they die, there is grief work to do.
At the same time, new futures are quickening. It is possible to stand in a graveyard of dreams and feel a spark of possibility take root. For us, that quickening shows up as an emerging commitment to grief-informed futures practice—working with triggers and tethers as legitimate categories, recognizing that in a world of war, mass atrocities, and climate chaos, the future is an already haunted landscape for many.
Futures We Would Prefer Not to Birth
Near the end of our dialogue, one of us invoked Melville’s Bartleby and his enigmatic phrase: “I would prefer not to.” In a field obsessed with generating options, there is power in naming the futures we refuse to help bring into being.
We would prefer not to create futures in which US hegemony is simply replaced by another empire with similar logics of extraction, militarism, and racial hierarchy.
We would prefer not to spend our limited time crafting cerebral utopias that ignore bodies, trauma, or grief. “If we’re going to navigate our challenges, we’ll have to do it with our bodies and our minds together. We can’t just create head-based utopias. We need empathy, the ability to see from others’ perspectives, to create tranquility even with people who disagree with us. An embodied and grounded hope.”
We would prefer not to perpetuate futures work that is method-obsessed and people-indifferent—where the elegance of the scenario matrix matters more than the wellbeing of the communities whose lives it sketches.
There is a great lie at the heart of both American technocracy and some strands of strategic foresight: that with enough data, enough models, enough cleverness, we can out-think history.
Coda: What We Carry
Our fathers are gone. The empire that shaped our childhoods is staggering—perhaps fatally wounded, yet still immensely dangerous. We stand in a kind of cemetery of futures, hands on cold stone, feeling both the weight of what has been lost and the faint pull of what is not yet born.
“The great contradiction, the great lie underlying American empire, is also the great lie of strategic foresight—that we just need a better mousetrap, more data, another scenario. What needs to be the generational gift? Just as we’ve benefited from the gifts of the Galtungs and the Polaks, the Sohails and Ivanas—what can be our ancestral gift?”
If there is something we wish to pass on, it is not the myth of American exceptionalism, nor the fantasy of foresight as a neutral, technocratic fix. It is a practice: To sit honestly with grief. To refuse harmful futures, even when they promise comfort or prestige. To build fractal spaces of participatory sense-making in the fissures of a crumbling hegemony. And to remember that every preferred future we nurture has, somewhere behind it, a grave of futures we chose not to resurrect.
The challenge is to find that space within the cracks. Because as we step on the sidewalk, the seedlings find the fissures. The thing can grow where it couldn’t grow elsewhere—precisely because God knows we’ve paved over everything.
Appendix: A Causal Layered Analysis
The following CLA unpacks our inquiry at four levels—moving from the visible surface of events to the deep myths that structure our experience of both personal and geopolitical loss.
Issue: Grieving Empire / Embodied Futures
| Layer | The Problem | The Transformed Response |
|---|---|---|
| Litany | US global influence is declining. Political dysfunction, institutional decay, and erratic foreign policy dominate headlines. Simultaneously, mid-career professionals experience personal losses—parents dying, certainties dissolving. | Participatory futures processes that help communities make sense of disruption. Grief is acknowledged as a legitimate dimension of futures work, not pathologized or bypassed. |
| Systemic Causes | Galtung’s metrics of imperial decline: military overreach, internal fracture, intensified violence as supremacy slips. Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis: hegemonic cycles of rise, overreach, and fall. Neoliberal hollowing of public institutions (education, foreign service, social safety nets). Intergenerational squeeze: mid-life adults caring for aging parents while raising children in precarious conditions. | Fractal futures: replicable, adaptable sense-making processes that communities can adopt without expert dependency. Popular education in the Freirian tradition—conscientização applied to futures. Decentralized, local, relational forms of foresight practice. |
| Worldview/Discourse | American exceptionalism: the US as “city on a hill,” bearer of universal values, rightful global leader. Progress narrative: history bends toward justice; multicultural democracy as inevitable destination. Technocratic foresight: with enough data, models, and cleverness, we can out-think history. Strategic consciousness as the dominant metaphor. | Post-hegemonic pluralism: no single nation or civilization holds the template for human flourishing. Embodied hope: futures work that integrates bodies, trauma, and grief rather than privileging cognition. Transformative foresight: apertures for seeing, knowing, and becoming that are plural, processual, and situated. |
| Myth/Metaphor | The Hospice: An empire with failing organs, hooked to military and financial life support, unable to imagine dignified release. Following Machado de Oliveira’s (2021) framing, this is modernity itself requiring hospicing—the work of sitting with dying systems without rushing to fix or save them. Domestic Violence: Watching from abroad as institutions meant to protect become perpetrators—and being unable to call for help. The Overturned Kitchen Table: The space of convening, sustenance, and honest conversation—now upended. | The Seedlings in the Cracks: Life emerging precisely where the paving has failed, growth in the fissures of hegemonic concrete. The Kitchen Reconvened: Small spaces where people of many backgrounds cook for one another without branding it as diversity. Ancestral Gifts: Second chances, community colleges, civil rights traditions—inheritances worth carrying forward, separated from the myth of empire. The Cemetery of Futures: Standing among graves of futures we chose not to resurrect, feeling both the weight of loss and the pull of what is not yet born. |
Reading the CLA
At the litany level, the visible symptoms—declining US influence, personal bereavements, professional disorientation—are typically addressed through expert analysis, policy adjustment, or individual coping. The response we propose shifts attention from fixing the litany to creating spaces for collective sense-making.
At the systemic level, structural explanations (imperial cycles, neoliberal hollowing, intergenerational squeeze) suggest partnership solutions—between generations, between communities, between ways of knowing. Our response emphasizes fractal replication: sense-making processes that spread horizontally rather than depending on centralized expertise.
At the worldview level, the collision between American exceptionalism, progress narratives, and technocratic foresight creates the disorientation we feel. The transformed worldview refuses the fantasy of a single “city on a hill” while embracing embodied, plural, situated approaches to futures.
At the myth/metaphor level, the deep stories that organize our grief—hospice, domestic violence, the overturned table—are met with counter-myths: the seedling, the reconvened kitchen, the cemetery where we consciously choose which futures to let rest. Following Machado de Oliveira (2021), we understand hospicing not as passive resignation but as the difficult, mature work of sitting with what is dying while remaining present to what seeks to emerge. These are not optimistic replacements but honest acknowledgments that new life requires composting the old.
AI assistance (Anthropic’s Claude) was used to help synthesize the exchange and highlight thematic resonances across the conversation.
References
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Continuum.
Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means: Peace and conflict, development and civilization. SAGE.
Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
Rifkin, J. (2009). The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. Tarcher/Penguin.
Rush, J. (2024). When the future dies: The here(after). World Futures Review, 16(1–2), 83–85.
Sardar, Z. (1993). Colonizing the future: The “other” dimension of futures studies. Futures, 25(2), 179–187.
Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press.
