In a time of both possibility and powerlessness, what story can help us find our way?
Humanity has never had more power to shape its future. Yet most of us feel too small to change the direction we’re heading in. We are caught between overwhelm and apathy, and between knowing a lot and doing little. Good intentions are not enough, and the same patterns keep repeating even when we want something different.
So what is this moment asking of us?
We have been taught that we are separate individuals, rational and self-interested, and that a good life means asking “what’s in it for me?” Yet research on happiness, and our own lived experience, keep pointing somewhere else: we feel most alive when we matter to others. We were each carried into this world by countless hands we never paid for. Society isn’t a thing that happens to us. It is something we do, together, every day.
In this talk, Erik Fernholm, initiator of the Inner Development Goals and chair of the Ekskäret Foundation, explores the stories that keep us stuck, and what a different one might feel like. Not a quick fix or forced optimism, but a hope grounded in reality: one that can hold grief and possibility at the same time, and from there ask what our hands are for.
After the talk we open the question to the room. The evening begins and ends with mingling, because after ten years of Klustret we know that what is called for usually emerges between people.
