In any discussion, there’s a collection of intuitive, shared contextual understandings.

If you’re engaged in a conversation about labor rights, it’s typically understood that you’re addressing the topic as it exists within the current economic, social, and geopolitical paradigm.

You could talk about how you think we need to move to a post-scarcity society so that the concept of “labor” as we think about it today is no longer a thing, but doing so would probably color outside the default guidelines of such discussions: it’s meta-contextual and may require an overt shift of conversational scope to be meaningful.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look up and down the context-scale to suss out solutions to problems and imagine realities that don’t exist, yet, but it does seem prudent to understand where contexts begin and end, and at what scale we’re operating so as to not talk past each other—missing out on points of commonality and opportunities to cooperate in the here and now because we can’t stop thinking and talking about how much better things would be if only everything was different.

This applies internally, as well.

It’s pleasant to consider how life might be different if we or the contexts we occupy were different, and I would argue it’s important to imagine such changes (even dramatic ones) so we have a sense of where we want to go and the motivation to get there.

But ideally we also have a productive grasp of where we are, today, so we can perceive the distance between here and there, and can thus accommodate and act upon contemporary realities (rather than ignoring or feeling persistently inconvenienced by them).

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