Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

“Utopian” as I use it simply denotes thinkers and movements that attempted to rearrange the domestic sphere in ways significantly out of keeping with the prevailing traditions of their societies for the purpose of living together in greater harmony in pursuit of either secular or spiritual goals.

changes in our intimate worlds would help us forge stronger and more harmonious societies.

resistance to new ways of thinking may be most extreme when it concerns how we structure our private lives.

sudden change forces us to question our perception of reality and consider new possibilities that may have previously seemed unthinkable.

The German sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to what he considered the normative role of “ideology,” a term he specifically defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure that upholds a particular “order of things” and protects those who wield political and economic power.

Once I started thinking about the world not as it was but as it might be, I could more clearly diagnose the problems with my own time and place—and mentally play with possible solutions.

“Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful,” Chernyshevsky wrote. “Love it, strive toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you can from it.”3

The word “Utopia” derives from the Greek roots for “not” and “place,” which means that “Utopia” references a “no place” or nowhere, although it is also a homonym for the word “Eutopia,” which means “good place.”

When we lose sight of the past, we lose sight of the idea that there were other pathways forward, other roads not taken. We begin to feel our present reality as static and inflexible. We convince ourselves that things cannot change, and that if they do, they will change for the worse.