Tilt[ed.7, 2026]
Over the Christmas break, I read Sean Kelly’s Quarterly Essay, The Good Fight. A couple of lines jumped out at me:
“What has happened to advocacy - to the belief that a central part of politics is changing people’s minds?”
“As soon as you begin to ask yourself, every day, what is possible, you have begun to curtail the notion of what is possible”
I consider myself an ambitious person. At the same time, a lot of what makes me relatively good at what I do is a healthy dose of pragmatism. My background in marketing taught me to observe people as they are - not as I hope they will be - and build campaigns, tool and insights from there.
But when the problems we’re attempting to solve require solutions we can’t yet imagine, does this pragmatism fail us? How do we make the impossible, possible?
It’s a question I’m always grappling with. One that, if I’m honest, scares me; how can I separate necessary pragmatism from a drifting moral clarity? How do I avoid accepting compromises that keep us stuck in the ‘possible’?
In trying to answer this, I’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to create ‘impossible change’. I’m sure my thoughts on this will continue to evolve, but here’s my current working theory…