your experiment is not getting us anywhere
I just finished another Friend Factory workshop.
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We are often taught that imagination is a door we use to leave a certain place when its walls start closing in on us; seeking refuge in a “somewhere else” that feels lighter, safer, and seemingly more controllable.
This is called escapism, and for a long time, we’ve treated it like a necessary safety valve. But there is a flaw in the exit strategy, which is: when you escape, you leave the terrain to those who created the walls in the first place.
There might be some sort of temporary relief, but the system you fled remains unchanged, waiting for your inevitable return.
Dun dun dun~
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Escape is an illusion.
Expansion is just deeper inclusion.
I admit, this mindset might sound like surrender. Like, being told to “just deal with it” or to adjust your expectations to fit a bad situation; the classic if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em scene. But no.
Deeper inclusion is not about submission; it is about sovereignty!
It is the difference between a prisoner trying to pick the lock and someone effortlessly walking through the wall because they realize the wall doesn’t occupy the same dimension they do.
When we talk about “expansion,” we are talking about cognitive and systemic scale, meaning, to include a problem in your expansion means you have grown to understand its mechanics so thoroughly that it no longer functions as a barrier.
I'd like to imagine a maze.
If you are standing inside it, the only goal is escape. You are at the mercy of the turns and the dead ends. But if you expand your perspective - if you rise, I don’t know, like, 100 feet into the air - the maze is still there. You haven’t “escaped” the geography of the maze, but you have included it in a much larger field of vision. So from up there, the “problem” of the dead end is irrelevant. You see the gaps, the shortcuts. You see the way around the maze.
Expansion is the process of becoming “aware enough” to see the maze as just a series of lines on a map, rather than a prison. It’s the move from being a victim of a system to being a master of its landscape, mapping it so thoroughly that it loses its ability to trap you.
If you want to make the world a better place, you proactively make a change! You include the constraint (the lack of resources) and expand your communal imagination to solve it.
If the future is to be inclusive and free, the present action must be inclusive and free. You are planting the seeds of the "after" while you are still standing in the "before."
On an introspective level, navigating the world this way changes your relationship with "failure". By understanding the mechanics of your struggle — why you feel anxious, why a system is oppressive, why a relationship is not working — you strip that struggle of its "mystique." It becomes a technical problem rather than a full existential threat.
You can walk the maze with a sense of play rather than a sense of panic.
But outsmarting a system is rarely a solo mission. While one person rising 100 feet in the air sees the map of the maze, a hundred people rising together can dismantle the maze.
When a community shares its collective history (the past it grew from), it gains the “cognitive scale” to see systemic patterns. You begin to see that the “dead ends” in your neighborhood are the same as the “dead ends” in the next town over. This shared “inclusion” of the problem is what makes the system lose its power to trap you. You realize the walls are only high if you remain small and isolated.
aaAAaaaa~
Imagination is a radical tool.
It isn’t for dreaming up new worlds to hide in, and instead, it’s for building a mental architecture large enough to hold the complexities of this one without being crushed by them.
When you include the difficulty, the corruption, or the technical constraint in your world-building, you strip it of its power to surprise you. That means that you are no longer “adjusting” to a bad circumstance; you are integrating it into a larger strategy where that circumstance becomes a leverage point, a resource, or merely an obstacle you’ve already accounted for.
When you expand your understanding, the things that used to trap you become the very things that guide your next move.
Awareness is always the baseline and mapping the maze is only the first step. The ultimate act of imagination is not only about seeing the way around the walls but also realizing that the walls are made of the same stuff as the exits.
We talked about the flaw of the exit strategy: how escaping leaves the terrain in the hands of those who built the walls, leaving the system unchanged for your inevitable return. But when you expand, there is no return. You, instead, occupy and change the geography itself.
The world, I think, isn’t something you are trapped inside of. It is something you are constantly growing to encompass. There is no exit strategy to whatever circumstance we are in but there is a permission to grow around and overpower them.
This is the most human thing we have ever known how to do: to stretch towards each other, to become large enough to hold contradiction, complexity, and care all at once. We grow so large, so aware, and so connected that the “maze” ceases to be a prison and becomes a playground for the future we’re already building.
The future isn’t coming. It is not a place we escape into.
It is something we cultivate here, in the middle of the maze, in the presence of one another. We aren't leaving the terrain behind; we are rehabilitating it. The future is being nurtured and grown right [here], under our feet.
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A more polished version of this write-up is on my Substack. I was channeling my inner journalist/feature writer while writing it. This was supposed to be a script for a solo episode of Under the Sink Show. But it was better as something written.
Gardening always,
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