Note: If you’d like to hear me read a version of this article, you can listen to the podcast version below.

I recently finished reading The Hunger Games for the first time (and by recently, I mean 12 hours ago). I enjoyed immersing myself in Suzanne Collins’s post-apocalyptic world, and I couldn’t help but draw many parallels between The Capital and our current ruling power structures. The entire book is great, but one sentence in particular stood out to me — and it’s the topic of this week’s newsletter. “Destroying things is much easier than making them.”

When a scandal occurs in a social or political institution, we’re often met with a chorus of voices urging us to “burn it all down!” Rarely are we presented with a path forward after the destruction. Everyone wants to be a revolutionary, but no one wants to build a phoenix from the ashes. This is understandable, of course. For one thing, we are often much more critical of new solutions than we are of the status quo. Because people are comfortable with the devils they know, we hold people who try to build new things to an impossible standard and take any missteps or setbacks as evidence that our current way of living is the only way that works.

We’re also constantly bombarded by propaganda from people with a vested interest in the status quo, aimed at convincing us that everything is actually fine and that any attempts to change or improve our society are an attack on personal freedom. Any flaws of the current system are waved away as unavoidable facts of life, while flaws of proposed systems are taken as evidence that those systems are objectively untenable.

I have a tattoo on my left forearm that reads “Imagine better than the best you know.” Our imaginations are often constrained by the societies we live in. Many people can’t picture a world that isn’t a capitalist oligarchy masquerading as a democracy, and dismiss any alternative as “unrealistic” or “against human nature.” In some places, our collective imagination is so stifled that we can’t even envision a planet where every person has equitable access to food and shelter without some apocalyptic economic crash happening as a result. How sad is that?

I’ve been thinking about what makes a good life and what I want my own life to amount to. Aside from my personal bucket list (traveling more, becoming a published novelist, and spending more time with friends), I also have a vision for what I want to offer my community. We all have something unique to contribute, and I think the best thing I can do is to expand our collective imagination through my writing. I want to inspire people to build, not destroy. If even one person sees a new possibility for living after reading a newsletter, article, or novel that I wrote, then I’ll have done my job.

Sometimes, destruction is a natural part of the building process. Structures that can’t be mended have to be replaced completely, and that’s life. But when we have a clear blueprint for what we’re building, we can move past the destruction phase with intention. When we destroy for the sake of destruction without having an idea of what’s next, we end up stuck in a pile of rubble.

Cheers to imagining better than the best we know.

Yours in hope,
Mina