"I create alternatives. I show that alternatives exist. Probably the sum total of my message to the world is that you do not have to do it one way."
Have you always done it like that?
Would a different approach bring more life?
What alternatives have you not considered trying?
These questions and their ilk should become perennial. Our many happy return to them should become like the re-use of a well-worn, much-loved tool. Their answers and their implementation should become littered across the landscape of our lives.
But to find these answers, we must see.
Sight can be obscured, our vision fails us, and what we perceive can be directed, distracted, and deceived.
If we don't tend to our eyes, they will fail to show us these alternatives.
Ursula K. Le Guin saw the novel, fiction, and especially science-fiction, as tools to reorient ourselves from the myopia of our time. Alternatives only exist in our imagination and the lived experience of others. To strike out from the norm is to venture into another life, another reality.
New ways of being come from new ways of seeing, and the cheapest hack for new ways of seeing I've come across is simply reading more...
"Science fiction is- well, no, not important, yet still worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life of the imagination..."