Just Picture It: How a Harmless Phrase Became the Planet’s Favorite Coping Mechanism
Just Picture It: A Planet-Wide Thought Experiment in the Age of Collapse
By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau
GENEVA—Close your eyes for a moment—unless you’re reading this while driving a Tesla on autopilot on the outskirts of Shenzhen, in which case, please keep them open. Now, just picture it: every human being alive simultaneously trying to imagine the exact same thing. A blue marble? A beach sunset? A zero-balance bank statement? Whatever the shared hallucination, the mere attempt would spike global energy demand by the output of three medium-sized petrostates, but let’s not let physics ruin a perfectly good thought experiment.
From Lagos boardrooms to Lapland saunas, the phrase “just picture it” has become the lingua franca of late-capitalist persuasion. It’s what sales reps in Dubai skyscrapers murmur to oligarchs considering yet another palm-shaped island, and what NGO field directors in the Sahel whisper to donors clutching reusable water bottles stamped with their own foundation’s logo. Picture it: a world where every problem can be solved by the collective willpower of well-intentioned visualization. If only the glaciers had better brand managers.
The international implications are, naturally, enormous. The OECD recently admitted it can no longer measure productivity because half of its member states’ workforces now spend office hours day-trading crypto while the other half are on mindfulness retreats learning to “manifest abundance.” Meanwhile, the UN’s latest climate report includes a footnote suggesting that if every person on Earth merely pictured a stabilized climate, the temperature curve would flatten by 0.0003 °C—statistically irrelevant, but emotionally bullish. Picture it: Greta Thunberg rolling her eyes so hard the Coriolis effect reverses.
In China, the government has gamified visualization. Citizens who upload daily “positive imagery” to state-approved platforms earn social-credit boosts redeemable for high-speed rail upgrades or extra pork rations during festival season. Over in Silicon Valley, a startup called DreamCoin just raised $200 million in Series C funding to tokenize communal fantasies; the white paper insists that once enough people picture the same utopia, the blockchain will hard-code it into reality. Their tagline: “Why build it when you can just mint it?” Picture it: venture capitalists lighting cigars with term sheets while the sea level politely waits for regulatory approval.
Europe, ever the responsible older sibling, has responded in typical fashion: regulation first, imagination later. Brussels is drafting the Mental Sovereignty Act, which will require all EU citizens to disclose any visualization exceeding 10 megatherms of emotional intensity. Violators face fines payable in euros or, more realistically, in whatever currency survives the next Italian election cycle. The European Parliament’s promotional video opens with a shot of a wind turbine morphing into a baguette—subtlety is not the continent’s strong suit.
Of course, not everyone is invited to the global vision board. Refugees in the Greek isles picture passports; day laborers in Qatar picture exit visas; and in the American Midwest, farmers picture rain that isn’t delivered by hurricane. The cruel irony is that those with the least bandwidth to fantasize are the ones most often fantasized about. Instagram influencers fly to Bali to photograph themselves “manifesting clean water” for villages whose wells were poisoned by the very airline miles used to get there. Picture it: irony dying of thirst at a poolside photo shoot, while the hashtag #Blessed trends at number one.
And yet, the darkly comedic genius of “just picture it” is its built-in absolution. If the planet burns, it’s not because we failed to act; it’s because we failed to visualize hard enough. The self-help gurus have essentially privatized eschatology: Apocalypse is a personal branding issue. Picture it: the last human alive scrolling through abandoned TikTok drafts, wondering why the algorithm never coughed up a manifestation tutorial for breathable air.
In the end, perhaps the only truly global consensus we’ll ever achieve is the shared mental image of ourselves, staring into the black mirror, whispering, “just picture it,” while the credits roll on the season finale of civilization. Fade to sponsored content.
