Is there a future free from urgency culture?
On divesting from manufactured urgency
Earlier this year at the GLOBE Forum, I talked about my effort in divesting from manufactured urgency in my life.
In my last “real job,” I remember feeling so unnecessarily stressed over deadlines we made up for ourselves, but kept underestimating the time it would take to get things done across competing priorities. Or delays that were out of our control as partners took longer than anticipated to respond to requests or complete tasks.
I would often quip (to some consternation) that we weren’t running an emergency room. No one would come to harm if a campaign launched a week later than planned or an event or project was delayed from the internal date we set for ourselves.
I was doing the job of at least two people (nonprofits, am I right?), working with a myriad of partners on multiple projects—and expected to produce at the pace of a single job.
Now, and for the last year and a bit, I am a completely independent freelancer/founder. I should be free from the shackles of manufactured urgency right? Liberated from entrenched systems that prioritize profit and outputs and productivity over all else.
But lo and behold, even though I felt that friction in previous roles, when let free, I was still creating urgency for myself.
How?
By feeling like I HAD to apply to every contract opportunity that even slightly fell in my wheelhouse—even if I found out about them 1 or 2 days before the submission deadline.
By creating urgent tasks and giving myself ambitious deadlines, basically holding myself to the same standards of urgency culture that I was so relieved to leave behind.
Even in my career coaching through my transition to full-time freelancing last year, my coach would often ask me, “Alicia, are you creating urgent tasks?”
Are you creating urgent tasks?
Most recently, in the Call for Submissions for our very first zine, I was locked into the idea that the publication had to be edited, produced and launched at or by the date of the UN Summit of the Future next month.
Not a bad idea at all:
I could point new connections to this very tangible manifestation of The Climateverse, and use the zine to highlight the wishes and desires of youth and other generations around the world. I could even analyze the submissions and report on the themes of the future most pertinent to our community, and work like hell to get those insights in front of decision-makers at the negotiation for the UN’s Pact for the Future.
A worthy goal , for sure.
But this is still very much a one-woman show, with some volunteer help on socials while working on other projects that pay the bills.
And then June came and went, and suddenly, I was staring down a very tight production timeline—not to mention the pressure of trying to get a decent number of submissions in on time.
People need time to build awareness and interest in a new idea or opportunity, and then preparation time to get a submission in.
You certainly don’t need me adding any urgency to your life, right?
Then, the opportunity to potentially host a Climateverse workshop at New York Climate Week (right after the UN Summit) came up, and my volunteer partnerships lead, Alexis, rightly pointed out that participants might want the opportunity to submit too, not just hear about the zine.
So then, what? A second special extended deadline for Climate Week folks? We could throw in a couple extra stories after the “public” deadline, right?
But the more I thought about it, I realized, “there you go Alicia, creating urgency yet again!”
What if the public deadline got pushed to after the Summit and into NY Climate Week?
Then launching the zine could be our own, local event, on home turf, sometime in the Fall where we could truly do our own thing: submitter performances, a panel, an interactive activity, food, drinks, music and community celebration.
And the longer I went down that route, the better I felt.
So the deadline got pushed (before I ever announced it in public) to late September, and I’m starting to plan and fundraise for a fun hybrid launch event that would be more cost effective, community-grounded and impactful than launching to a bunch of strangers in NYC could be right now.
[And all of the advocacy and insight sharing could still happen too!]
About Urgency Culture
I tend to to call it “manufactured urgency” because it is an urgency that isn’t real, but rather one we’ve created to serve a system of exploitation.
From the wonderful folks at Evenings and Weekends Consulting:
It demands that we treat ourselves, and each other like machines that need to be on and producing at an automatic pace.
But what if we saw ourselves as gardens instead?
Or, as my new friend Pattie Gonia would say: as a meadow?
We need all sorts of plants in our meadow-garden, that bloom and grow at different paces and under different conditions. That require healthy soil, sun exposure, sufficient water to grow. That require care in a myriad of ways, and rest, and freedom to “produce” or bloom (or not) at the pace and scale that makes most sense for each of us individually, and all of us collectively.
That’s the only way we’ll be ready for the future(s) already on their way, and the ones we’d like to set into motion: if we’re rested, resourced and cared for enough to sustain ourselves over the long-haul, and to address the rightfully urgent work of climate and social justice.
I once wrote about Rest as Climate Action. Read more here.
Today, I leave you with this reflection:
What might divesting from manufactured urgency in your work or personal life look like?
What does a future beyond urgency culture provide us?
Latest updates
I had such a blast delivering the keynote session for the Toronto Youth Environment Council annual conference earlier this month: Journeying into the Climateverse.
We took a look at Earth today, detailed our preferred futures, and used the Three Horizons futures method to chart the path from Earth to the Climateverse.
We then wrapped up with some reflections and sharing on the personal transformations we need to embody in parallel with all the societal change we’d like to see in the world to make our visions come to life.
If your organization is interested in talks/workshops like these, please do get in touch, they are so much fun and inspiration for all!
And last week was another delight as we held our first future visioning workshop to help with zine submission brainstorming.
Here’s a graphic of the timeline we mapped from 2024-2030 if you’d like some inspiration yourself.
If there’s demand, I might do another round of this before the submission deadline, so please let me know!
Til next time!