I had plans to actually celebrate the summer solstice properly this year by going along the coast to Ales Stenar, a stone circle site which is presumed to have been constructed some time in the Nordic iron Age, around 1,500 years ago. Of course, events (dear boy) intervened, and so I’ll be doing a rather less pagan celebration of the turn of the season today, in the company of L____’s family; this will consist mostly of eating potato salad and grilled pork products, and (in my case, at least) politely refusing to eat herring in any shape or form whatsoever.

This feels like a landmark midsommar in a way that none of them have for quite some time, due to a bunch of arcs in my own narrative of circumstances coming together and crossing the axis at the same time. While I technically have a week of paid leave on the clock, I am in effect no longer an employee of academia, though I am retaining affiliate relationships of varying strength with both Lund and Malmö for the short to medium term, thanks to the generosity of colleagues in those institutions. As promised earlier in the year, I have stopped applying for academic grants and positions; there is still one outstanding grant application in the pipe, which I will hear about in mid-October, but—in the name of preemptive expectation management—I am assuming that, like every application since the Marie Curie bid that allowed me to relocate to Sweden, it will be declined. I had my lucky roll of the dice in this space; expecting another one to come up is foolish, exemplary of the sunk cost fallacy.

(I’m certainly not ruling out a return to academia, but I am definitely renouncing further attempts to follow what we might describe as the “greasy pole” route to a faculty gig. Wandering back in through a side door, whether by accident or by invitation, is a different story entirely.)

I am still working at Tomelilla kommun, doing creative futures work around the climate roadmap and citizen dialogue policy projects there. Exactly what final shape these will take remains uncertain: we know what we want to do, but getting the relevant permissions and approvals and partnerships set up is taking more time than one might like. Nine months is not actually a very long time in the context of local government, and perhaps particularly so in the context of a small, rural municipality such as Tomelilla. As such, we’re in the process of renegotiating my time commitment with Vinnova (the funding body whose money have made the position possible), thinning down my %FTE in order to stretch the total calendar-time encompassed to the end of the year.

This has the additional advantage of freeing up bandwidth for taking on freelance and consulting work. I’ve had a few queries about my availability over the last half year, and the old instincts have roused like dogs dozing in the sun: when someone says “are you available for work?” you reply “when do you want me to start?” In light of seeming disinterest from academia (or at least its hiring and funding systems), this is partly a matter of sensing that the wind is blowing in a different direction, and that tacking to catch it might be a wise move given the general levels of economic uncertainty, locally and globally. (There is a definite “leave early to avoid the rush” thing in the mix, too; the numbers of applicants for even the very lowest positions in the Swedish academic ecosystem are frankly insane right now, and eventually other people are gonna realise that and make for the exits themselves.)

But it’s also a matter of noticing that the discourse has changed a lot in the decade I’ve been squatting in the ivory tower: creative/inductive approaches to futuring have gone from being marginal novelties to something close to mainstream, and strategic uncertainty is no longer a hard sell. That I’ve given four public presentations in the last month or so is, I have chosen to assume, indicative of this: people seem ready to hear what I have to say, so I should get out there and say (and do) it.

The practical upshot of these shifts is that I will have capacity for consulting and freelance work from the start of August—so if you, or anyone you know, might have need of my abilities, drop me a line and ask! (You can find a consulting CV at my canonical website; said CV and said website will both be updated very soon.) I will still be focussing on my futuring specialisms (i.e. climate adaptation and infrastructural transformation), but I’m keen to maintain a more generalist skillset, so don’t assume that a project outside of those themes would be of no interest to me. On the contrary: the joy of this field is that it’s one in which you can turn to and learn about new things, and do useful work in the process.

The other upshot is that the energy I have poured into writing academic publications and applications can now be redirected to other sorts of writing aimed at a different (and, I hope, wider) audience. There are many aspects to this part of the plan, but the most visible one should be an increase of output here at VCTB—output of greater substance and thematic rigour than has been standard of late. I’ve had a decade to think deeply on a whole lot of things; now begins the work of translating that thinking into something legible and useful outside of the sacred groves.

Part of me thinks that I should look at trying to monetise that process: start a newsletter (or deploy a website/newsletter hybrid, e.g. Ghost). But another part thinks no, the ideas should flow out for free, and the money should come from folk wanting more specific or bespoke versions thereof. I have zero interest in becoming another stuffed suit in the TED-talk-thought-lord ecosystem, and I retain my assumption that the shallowness of so much of that discourse comes precisely from the business model. I may not be an academic any more, but I choose to see myself as a public intellectual—and for me at least, that means that the bulk of the thinking is (for the) public, not paywalled. In this day and age, that may be a sort of economic suicide… but principles which you only hold to while holding to them is easy are not principles, they are merely ideals. You’ve gotta be the thing that you think is right; sell the work, not your soul. How you write is what it’s for.

So there we are. There’s a bunch of stuff from the last year or so that needs writing up here, which I will start clearing down over July. Before that, L____ and I have a much-needed holiday in Hamburg next week, provided that railway strikes don’t block our journey there; we’re returning by ferry, which also means we get to spend a day wandering the old Hansa town of Lubeck.

And before that, as already mentioned, it’s midsommar. In my downtown Malmö apartment block, that will mean young folk drinking late and playing appalling music very loudly, which is why I’ll be spending the night at L____’s place. Poor KJ will have to bear it alone; the photo above suggests she’s already bunkering down, though the acoustic damping effect of the ubiquitous Ikea bag is to the best of my knowledge largely untested.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, a happy midsommar to you, too. The times may be grim, but the world keeps turning, and taking time to acknowledge and even celebrate that fact is one of the many things that will enable us to cope with what’s to come.