A Humanist’s Guide to the Next Revolution

Author’s Note: This isn’t an old man’s ramble. It’s an attempt to make sense of sixty‑five years of learning, unlearning, and imagining better futures. If there’s any wisdom here, it’s only because so many others handed it to me first.

“What’s past is prologue.” — The Tempest

Sixty‑five years is long enough to see patterns repeat and long enough to recognise when they finally break. I don’t think of this birthday as a milestone. It’s a checkpoint, a moment to look at the world I inherited, the work I’ve done, and the future that still needs building.

As I mark another orbit around the Sun, I’m reminded that our journey begins when we first act on the world, and ends only when we can no longer contribute to it.

I was born into a narrow set of expectations: straight stories, straight lines, straight heroes. Those narratives shaped the world around me, even when they had no room for people like me. Humanism taught me to question who those stories served. Queerness taught me to recognise the gaps. Science fiction taught me that the future is not fixed; it’s constructed. Activism helped me translate my ideals into reality. Those threads have shaped every orbit of my life.

Across every orbit, I’ve learned that the future isn’t something we inherit, it’s something we author. And creativity isn’t passive — it’s a decision to step into the future and start shaping it with your own hands.

First Steps, First Journeys

I didn’t inherit a legacy so much as a set of constraints. The stories available to me as a young person were rigid, moralising, and exclusionary. They told me who mattered and who didn’t. They told me what a life should look like. They told me what futures were possible. I learned early that those stories were incomplete. I didn’t reject them outright; I examined them, kept what was useful, and discarded what wasn’t. That process — assessing, revising, rebuilding — became the foundation of my work.

My first steps toward creative authorship came in stages: raising money for charity at twelve, rejecting homophobic Christianity at twenty‑seven, deepening my activism and community work across the decades that followed, and interrogating the cult of consumerist capitalism in my sixties. Each step was a refusal, a quiet revolution against the stories that tried to shape me.

Those choices enabled me to outgrow the religion I was raised in and find humanism as the position that gave voice and form to my ethics and efforts. The so‑called “Golden Rule” appears across religions and philosophies, a genuinely humanist idea that unites us despite creed or culture. I find comfort in the African concept of Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — a philosophy of shared humanity as old as our origins on that continent.

History is full of people who challenged the systems that harmed them — from medieval critics of religious extremism to modern voices questioning the inequalities produced by consumerist capitalism. As I grow older, I find myself asking whether the stories we’ve been trained to uphold still serve us. That isn’t radical; it’s simply the same humanist instinct that has guided every step of my life.

Life Stories

The stories I’ve written across my life weren’t planned. They emerged from necessity. During the AIDS crisis, activism wasn’t optional. It was survival. We built care networks because the world refused to care for us. Those years taught me that community is not an abstract value; it is a practice. Queer activism reinforced that lesson. We made ourselves visible in systems designed to erase us. We built archives, families, and movements that refused to disappear. Human rights work expanded that frame again, showing me how dignity is contested globally and how easily it can be denied.

My wider human rights activism helped me make a tangible difference: saving lives, rewriting laws, shifting community attitudes. My thirty‑three year involvement with Amnesty International Australia instilled in me the belief that “it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”. In a world where wars escalate and human rights are being wound back, darkness is encroaching further into our lives. We can lock down into our isolated, insulated little bunkers and ignore the suffering of others, or we can step out into discomfort and join the fight.

Science fiction informed my journey — more than just recognising Captain Kirk’s moral imperative in his dying words, “Have I made a difference?” Science fiction gave me a language for possibility and a framework for imagining alternatives. Fandom, especially, taught me how to construct new architecture and how to rebuild it when it failed. It taught me that futures are not inherited; they are authored.

Now, at sixty‑five, I can see the connections more clearly. The work of activism, humanism, and futurism is the same work: identifying who is excluded, understanding why, and building structures that refuse that exclusion. The future I want is not a single narrative. It is a network of many. Africanfuturist, Indigenous futurist, Asian futurist, queer and trans futurist. Each one expands the map. Each one challenges the idea that there is only one centre or one path forward. Young futurists aren’t waiting for permission; they’re already remixing the world into something new.

I don’t have a long‑term partner or dependent biological children, but I’ve never lacked family. I have students whose lives intersect with mine, friends who walk beside me, activist colleagues who share my passions, and refugees I’ve supported as they rebuild their futures. Astronauts are courageous, activists are resilient, but refugees are the strongest people I know. Their lives remind me that strength is not loud or heroic; it is the quiet, daily work of rebuilding a future after everything familiar has been taken away. These relationships have taught me that family is not defined by blood or lineage. The human family is the one to which we all belong: a network of care, responsibility, and shared becoming. They remind me that the future belongs to those who rebuild it, not those who cling to the past.

The Meaning of Liff

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd wrote The Meaning of Liff as a playful reminder that meaning is something we invent — we give names to the unnamed, we define the overlooked, we create significance where none was provided. That idea has always resonated with me. I’m mindful of Brian Cox’s reminder that consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself. It reframes the old question about the meaning of life: meaning isn’t discovered; it’s authored. If humanity disappears, the universe loses the only consciousness we know — and the only maker of meaning we know it contains. There’s something electrifying about realising we’re the universe’s way of drafting its own next chapter.

As I reach sixty‑five (an age that less than one percent of humanity attains) I think of the many friends, heroes, role models, and mentors who have already gone. In my twenties, I literally held the hands of young friends as they died during the AIDS epidemic. In more recent decades, I’ve watched older science fiction friends depart: the people who taught me to look to the future, to imagine alternatives, to build what didn’t yet exist.

And in the present, I sometimes hear of refugee friends dying — a reminder that loss is not only a memory of the past but a reality unfolding now, and that the comfortable world around us still turns away from the suffering of most of humanity.

I mourn my heroes and mentors too: AIDS and human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, authors, astronauts, scientists, refugees. Their lives shaped mine. Their courage, curiosity, and defiance helped me understand that meaning is not bestowed from above; it is created through action, imagination, and solidarity. As we lose our heroes and role models, we inherit an obligation to become those very things for others.

That idea reinforces my belief that our task is not to search for meaning, but to create it.

The Journey From Here

Twenty years ago, I survived two rounds of significant heart surgery. I am alive because two other people donated their heart valves when they died. My life continues their legacy — and this is particularly significant given that neither I nor my surgeon expected me to survive for twenty years. That survival carries an obligation: to make my life count, to honour the meaning their lives made possible.

I don’t feel finished. I don’t feel settled. I am absolutely not retired. I feel engaged. The next orbit is not about legacy; it’s about authorship: the ongoing work of shaping a future where everyone belongs.

I’m still learning. Still unlearning. Still building. Still becoming. And for the first time, I can see the shape of the work ahead — not as a burden, but as an invitation.

The next orbit begins now.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial assistance by Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared.