Late afternoon already? Rebecca shifts the layers of her petticoat and rolls her eyes, but only once she's sure no one's looking. That took foreva. Realpolitik. That was the word they'd settled on. Facts at hand, no more abstract programs. Politics based on what was possible and what was not. So August. Her hands ached from writing it all down.

They weren't chasing ideas, they kept saying. They were there to achieve goals. Asap. But Rebecca knew what being realistic really was: their way of giving up. Their ideas hadn't worked, so they'd made a word pretty enough to dress up the surrender. They'd quit at the exact moment the thing needed a fight. And not quitting is hard work, like raising a child, you simply don't get to stop. You keep going, exhausted but present.

August was never going to manage that. She watched him across the table, all apricots and curly hair, lovely really, the kind of man you'd want to look at rather than listen to. Not built for the long, unglamorous work of staying. Nope, she thought, setting down her pen. This ends in a detour again.

"Realistic" hardened into its modern meaning after the dreams of 1848 got crushed. It never meant true. It means probable based on the past. A forecast wearing the mask of a fact. You can’t describe reality so instead you bet on continuity. Despair is similar, it also assumes the future resembles the past, so realism lets it pass. It’s the out-of-jail card. "Realistic" only objects when you suggest things could change.

And who was allowed to describe that world? August, George, Joseph. Not Esther, not Johanna. The minority who decided what was possible back then was white, wealthy and wore pants. Realistic worked as an oath to the world as it was, not a truth-test.

Today, in the polycrisis of 2026, “be realistic” is the least reality-based thing you can say. We can’t base today’s world on the past. In our accelerated present last year is yesteryear. For August this era is what my kids call “verkehrte Welt” – a world turned upside down. And the time to discuss if the old rules ever worked? We seem to skip that, as if it weren’t important. That’s how things get lost.

From the mid-19th century onwards ‘being realistic’ was what men wore at meetings. It got you a place at the table. When I worked as a consultant in 2012 (still mostly men) being realistic was being deployed the same way August used it yeeears ago. I was working in Innovation management and my task was to dismantle ‘being realistic’ with play, crayons and reframing techniques.

I was often the only woman in the room and I brought the crayons. Not Excel, not Power Point, huge white blank paper and colored crayons. This was what Thomas and Günther called ‘Kindergarten’. For the first few rounds ideas got killed quickly. What if—? Nope. Could we—? Be realistic. The process was met with resistance and ridicule until it worked. Change works that way. Nothing changes for a long time. Until it does.

What’s this got to do with hope? Realism still treats hope like a category error. The POV our world has become accustomed to, the one August and his peers brought to the table, is just that: a limited point of view. Hope, care and imagination have been banned to the kids’ table. It's been dismissed as the soft stuff that reality eats for breakfast. And it will stay like this, until enough of us come together and undo the detour Rebecca saw coming.

Somewhere between naive and embarrassing, the older we get the quieter our hope gets. Kids know the world is on fire and they state it matter of factly. I’ve been smoothing the edges of catastrophe down, because we can’t handle the hopelessness of it. I’ve sat in climate conferences where I was told that we can’t state the facts because we would scare the population. Choosing calm over informed? That’s where we gave up (not on the climate) being the grown-up.

If we strip the grown-up rigour we can act on our intuitive hope right now, turning it from wishful thinking into decisive action. ‘Being realistic' is an excuse dressed as maturity. It excuses those in power for holding the line, and lets everyone else sink into the plush, 19th century cushions of giving up.

The cheapest, fastest way to get the world back on track is to tell people how many of us already want things to change. Almost nobody is doing this. 89% of us want real change. The loneliness of the hopeful? A myth!

We need hope that survives contact with reality because it’s the thing that gets us off the floor after the loss, amidst the chaos. We need hope we can build on, plan from, organise around. That isn’t childish, or wait! Maybe this is childlike and that’s the whole friggin point.

Pairing women & children in the dismissive corner has been a power move for centuries. It's systemic. There is no other table: the world is made up of mothers and their children.

We are the table.

2056 My grandson cannot BELIEVE we used to argue about whether his present was realistic. He doesn’t have a word for emissions, because he lives emission free on an Arctic vessel his mom built that can turn salt water into drinking water with a simple chemistry trick called oxypluron. He can’t quite fathom why it took so long for regular people to start the humongous protests of the 2030s. “What were you all waiting for?” he asks me, while his tea steams into his ice-cold cheeks. I grab a flaky biscuit. “We were so alone” I reply. “It took a while to understand that this was a collective feeling, not a personal one.”

Written by a human. Unpolished. On purpose.