Alternative Prosperity: Reframing The "Good Life"
A report exploring new narratives for a more sustainable, just and enjoyable way of living
“The secret to change is to focus all your energy
not on fighting the old,
but on building the new.”
Dan Millman
A few weeks ago, I shared with you that I’m working on a report about reframing “the good life”. I finally have it ready for you to download and dive in:
This report explores the foundational narratives that shape our current, destructive mode of living and proposes counter-narratives aimed at cultivating a much more enjoyable, fulfilling, communal, and regenerative way of prospering.
Spanning 41 pages, it also includes quite a few visual explorations (you know I like these! 😉) and introduces an initial framework (version 1). This framework will hopefully help you (re)imagine products, services, campaigns, organizations, and basically anything that’s more in harmony with nature and well-being.
I put this report together because I believe that our current conception of prosperity is breaking down while the need for a new story of prosperity has never been greater. On top of that, existing ideas haven’t really led to the systemic transformation that’s necessary as they are still rooted in the dominant, destructive narratives of our era.
So, I am thrilled to share this report with you!
Please feel free to share any feedback with me once you read it! And for everyone, and especially those who have supported my work for a long time now, please do help me spread the word about the report by sharing this email or the direct link to the report with friends, colleagues, on social media, etc. This would help me a lot! Thanks! 🙏
The report is available for download on Gumroad via the button below. It’s a donation- or pay-as-you-want pricing model, so it's really up to you how much you want to give, if any! 😉
Okay, enough information, here’s the link to download the report:
Thank you,
Thomas
PS: I wanted to add some quick fun facts about the paintings and artists that are shown in the report, as I didn’t pick them by chance 😜 and believe in the “power” of visuals or art in conveying a message. I used two paintings by Thomas Cole and one by Albert Bierstadt.
Thomas Cole
The Economist wrote a piece about him that’s titled “Environmentalist art before there was an ‘environment’.” In it, they describe how Cole always “sought to enshrine unspoiled nature as an endangered Eden.” And that his experience of industrial England, compared to the beauty of nature that he saw when he traveled to the “new world”, i.e. America, gave him a “renewed purpose to sound a warning of nature’s destruction by the greed of industry.”
In the report, I used one painting from Coles series “The Course of Empire” created between 1833 and 1836, which depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary city or landscape through greed (or a wrong mode of living). The painting I used shows the arcadian or pastoral state in which humanity is at peace with the land. The other painting from Cole is actually not part of the series but still related to it. L’Allegro seems to depict a scene that’s similar to the arcadian state painting but in the future, in which people build a new and better world after an old world collapsed.
That is why I picked the arcadian or pastoral state painting for the report cover and new mode of living section and the L’Allegro for the alternative prosperity framework section.
Albert Bierstadt
Bierstadt also got famous for his paintings depicting America, “the new world”, and its nature. And while some say he presented an “idealistic, Eden-like view of the landscape and portrayed the native inhabitants as unspoiled, noble people living in a paradise” and that his paintings of the Yellowstone region even helped create the Yellowstone National Park, others point out that “he painted the west that America wanted.” An old NYT article about him notes:
“What is disconcerting and characteristic about the painting is that nothing in it has any personality. There is no artistic identification with any part of the landscape. There is no sense that Bierstadt was painting anything that really mattered to him. The attitude is one of scientific detachment. Bierstadt was hungry for data, hungry to turn feeling into data and give his work a scientific, laboratory air. What matters is not the grass, lake or mountain, but the detached and majestic effect.”
That’s why I picked Bierstadt’s painting for the section about a desire for something new and the problem of even new solutions still being stuck in old ideologies and mindsets.
That’s the little, nerdy extra info about the report’s main visuals!
Enjoy!