How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World

By Rob Hopkins. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025. 192 pages. $29.95/hardcover.

This book asks anyone overwhelmed with dread and anxiety for the future to try envisioning a better world, because we can’t create a better world if we don’t first imagine it. Rob Hopkins is a creative, playful, and visionary man. He cofounded the Transition Movement in 2006, an international organization bringing local people together to create thriving, resilient communities. He has written numerous books, including a precursor to this book: From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. In this new book, we imagine ourselves actually traveling to that future to experience what we need to work for.

Be prepared to hear “time-travel stories” from around the globe, and maybe get an inkling of how the future might feel. People who transport their minds to the future say they experience a real sense of freedom, which is a relief valve for any anxieties they feel about living in the present. I was very touched by the time-travel experience in North Philadelphia, Pa., a predominantly Black neighborhood. Resident Rasheedah Phillips asked, “How does a radical movement conceive of its own future when the future was never meant for them?” This type of time travel is called “Afrofuturism,” described by American singer and rapper Janelle Monáe as “Black people seeing ourselves in the future.”

When Hopkins leads a time-travel event, he often uses sounds (there’s even an available playlist) and smells to help the travelers notice that they are in a different place. He’s outfitted in a makeshift space suit and holds the time machine, a small box with a light inside. The last chapter in the book is titled “A Time Machine Blueprint,” in which Hopkins encourages future facilitators to create their own time machines. He encourages playfulness and lots of creativity.

You can see what it might be like, knowing that each time-travel experience will be different because of the people and the creators. To get an idea of the activity, watch a YouTube video titled “Town Anywhere Tooting,” which takes place in a district in South London. This really hooked me on wanting to travel to the future with the neighbors in my town.

Although there is a lot of fun involved, keep in mind that this is serious work. This helps us have a real vision for a healthy future. As Hopkins says, “It won’t happen by magic.”

But perhaps it can be accelerated, brought forward, if we can find those ways to rend the fabric of time, to release the hold the present has over us, to release our certainty of linear time. If we can master the art of time travel, become adept sprinklers of pixie dust, help people experience stepping into the near future and bring it back with us . . . perhaps we might be able to accelerate things in as-yet unimaginable ways.

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Ruah Swennerfelt is a member of Middlebury (Vt.) Meeting and is clerk of the New England Yearly Meeting Earthcare Ministry Committee. She is also an active member of Third Act Faith, Champlain Valley Indivisible, and Sustainable Charlotte Vermont. She and her husband are homesteaders on lands that once were home to the Abenaki.