f*ck i loved that

Ep.07: Radical Imaginations

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-18:36

Ep.07: Radical Imaginations

Pathways for getting from here to futures worth living in

Jenn McRae

Jul 18, 2025

Transcript

More from f*ck i love you
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f*ck i loved that the pod | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

If you prefer, you can listen to me read this week’s Note from Jenn. And no. That’s not a mistake. This actually is a really short one today :)

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Last Week’s Episode

Ep.06: The Future is Female*

Jenn McRae and She Writes AI

Jul 11

Read full story

o0. Contents

o1. This Week’s Holy F*ck Moments

o2. Note From Jenn

o3. Today’s Notebook

o4. Featured Substackers

o1. This Week’s Holy Fck Moments*

If scarcity is a design choice, then abundance can be one, too. Our entire economic reality is built on the manufactured need for scarcity, but that means we have the power to consciously design a new system based on sufficiency, connection, and abundance.
Whoever owns the stories directs the future. This is the ultimate power move; imagination isn't just a whimsical escape, it's the active, strategic battlefield where reality is shaped, making storytelling the most critical lever for change.
We're not stuck with capitalism vs. socialism; history offers a proven, third-way blueprint. Ancient Islamic governance provides a sophisticated, architectural model that successfully prevented the runaway concentration of wealth and power for centuries, proving that viable, equitable alternatives aren't just theory—they've already been built.

o2. Note From Jenn

I have loved books since forever. I have only ever culled my collection three times for moves, each time reluctantly.

Some people have babies.

I have books.

When men I date come to my place for the first time I am quietly waiting to see if an interest is taken in my books.

I’ve come to call this the ‘bookshelf test’. It turns out it’s a 100% reliable indicator. The ones who spend the longest with my books have also spent the longest in my heart.

do you want to take the bookshelf test?

My bookshelves were built by one of my favourite humans,

Julien Thomas

. We’ve been friends for almost twenty years. He stops at my bookshelf nearly every time he comes over just in case there’s something new he hasn’t seen yet.

Over the last few days I did the thing where you organize all your books by colour.

It gave me a chance to see them all again; to see the patterns in what I pick; the themes and clusters of interest; to reminisce on the stories of where they came from and why — and often, from whom.

And the reflection I had that matters for today’s episode (because I know you’re wondering where the hell this is going) is we have more than enough good ideas for futures worth living in.

We are lousy with ideas.

Really fucking good ones from really, really smart people.

Ideas are not our problem.

Doing is.

Implementation.

Action.

Practices.

Behaviours.

And it’s not that we don’t need the ideas and the books and the articles.

We absolutely need guides to get to the doing. Frameworks. Blueprints. Conceptual maps. Actual maps. Checklists. Models.

And stories.

We especially need stories.

Stories govern our lives.

They tell us what’s possible.

They are what we use to draw our maps.

So that’s what today’s episode is.

It’s a start.

A collection and a curation for a bigger, evolving project to identify the mindsets, actions, initiatives, frameworks and pathways for getting from here to there. To futures worth living in.

And while there absolutely is a need for time banks and local currencies and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and a thousands other designs — many of which this episode covers — the inescapable truth is we must be able to imagine it to do it.