Have you played a “What If?” game? At some point in a parent’s life and in a child’s life, they may have initiated or participated in a game of asking ‘What if?’ questions to gain insights into how another person thinks, for example: What if a neighbor comes to the door and your parents aren’t home? What if your car has a low tire and you don’t have a spare tire or a tire pump? There are online “What If?” games that ask random questions that get to deeper concerns or to get to know other people, such as: What if AI takes over the world? What if plastic was banned? What if someone wrote an article about you - would you be a hero or a villain or an anti-hero? ‘What If?’ questions allow us to ‘try on’ an idea without actually committing to it and to explore possibilities to address situations we face.
What are some ‘What If?’ situations you consider worth exploring? I’ll start by sharing some ‘What If? scenarios I think about:
*What if Americans were more interdependent, rather than independent? Here is an example of how the concept of the ‘ nuclear family’ moved us from a collective family group to a nuclear family’ shifted Americans from being interdependent on the entire family and one’s community to being a nucleus, contained smaller family unit that is more independent from other nucleus family units. The origins of the nuclear family, “…Dates to the 1920s, when the academic fields of anthropology and sociology were both still young. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Bronisław Malinowski, considered a founder of social anthropology, as the coiner of the term. At the time nuclear family was coined, the word nuclear inhabited contexts other than those most familiar to us now. Its use was broad and tied, as it still is, closely to uses of its parent word, nucleus, which had been a member of the language for 250 years. Tracing the development of the word ‘nucleus’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, we see that it was first applied in English in the mid-late 17th century to the brightest mass of matter in the head of a comet. Its origin is New Latin, from Latin nucleus, meaning ‘kernel.' Other astronomy meanings followed, with the word referring to other bright and dazzling celestial sights, such as the relatively small, brighter, and denser portion of a galaxy, or the hot faint central star of a planetary nebula…The ‘nuclear’ in nuclear family is figurative, and it comes from an extension of those varied scientific applications of nucleus. In addition to the astronomy, botany, and other technical applications, nucleus has also since the mid-18th century meant simply ‘a basic or essential part,’ with many examples of the term describing people considered core to some organization or effort. In coining ‘nuclear family,’ Malinowski was hitching a sensible descriptor to the word family to create what is now one of our basic familial designators. No one could have known at the time that that descriptor would go nuclear” (qtd. in https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/nuclear-family-history-origin).
What if smaller family units — including single people and/or with children-didn't stay separated from their larger family units and community units so that they could share financial, residential, and possessions? Housing and other living expenses would be more affordable with the pooled resources of the extended family unit together. An extended family unit didn’t have to be birth or adopted or married relationships; it could be friends who create a shared economy. Think of the old TV show, The Golden Girls, from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s. Four women shared a home and their lives together. They all thrived because they had each other as friends and as a contained family economy.
*What if we didn’t encourage almost everyone to go to college after high school graduation? Research shows that one of the key reasons young people may have been encouraged to go to college is because, at least in America, of the G.I. Bill of the 1940s. Suddenly, the number of college applicants surged. The parents of the Baby Boomers, the Silent Generation, pushed their children to go to college to get white-collar jobs to get the jobs that would yield middle to upper class income.
The Baby Boomers and Gen Xers too saw how well their parents were doing after getting college education that may have cost as low as $5,000. for a bachelor’s degree and their education debt could be paid off more easily even on minimum wage: “Boomers could work minimum wage and pay off college debt—a feat that would take Millennials at least twice as long” (https://www.kansascity.com/news/business).
Of course, the Silent, Baby Boomer, and Gen X generations advised their children that to be eligible for the higher paying jobs, a college education was essential. Too many people went to college. While they had no way of knowing the cost of living would far exceed salaries for their Millennial, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha children, many people from the generations after Gen X took their parents’ and grandparents’ advice, went to college, and are now drowning in education debt.
What if we encouraged and celebrated learning a trade rather than skipping off to a mountain of higher education debt? When I worked as a Cast Member at Walt Disney World, I overhear a little gift tell her mother that she wanted to work at Disney when she grew up. The mom snort-laughed and said, “You’re smarter than that. Those jobs are for people who don’t go to college and can’t do anything else.” As cordially as I could, I told the little girl, whose mother blushed over my letting them know I heard what she had said that we’d love to have the little girl as a Disney Cast Member one day, that there was a college program and almost all of my bosses there started in the college program. And, I told them that I earned a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees…and I was working at the most magical place on earth!
Our plumber earns more money than I did. Our electrician earns more money than I did. Our auto mechanic earns more money than I did. I earned advance degrees, but, the salaries I had did not surpass what others earned in trades.
Becoming a skilled tradesperson is not “Plan B”! It’s a viable career choice. What if we stopped pushing college degrees?
*What if some jobs had a four-day work week combined with job sharing?
*What if remote working were the norm?
*What if a parent who stays home with her/his children to parent and/or to educate them got paid to do so?
*What if there were more than 2 viable political parties in the USA?
*What if religious organizations paid taxes?
*What if “trickle down economics” went away?
*What if the Internet was free to everyone?
*What if wealthy people paid their fair share in taxes and had fewer loopholes rather than burdening the middle and poorer classes?
*What if there were term limits for the Supreme Court?
*What if older adults were respected and were seen as mentors?
*What if homeless people had community provided food to eat and safe places to sleep?
*What if basic human rights were honored and protected?
*What if everyone could afford necessary medical and prescription needs?
I could go on and on; still, I’d like to hear from you. What are your ‘What If?’ questions? I suspect this is how life evolves and innovation sparks; asking ‘what if?’ allows us to explore how to make life better for everyone. Please share your thoughts / ideas by commenting below if you are reading this on social media or send a message to me at reimaginelife22@gmail.com .
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