Capitalism squeezes and distorts our experience of time. Everything feels like it’s moving so fast, that every problem is an urgent one, that there are never enough hours in the day because the imperative to maximize and optimize every moment is omnipresent. Rethinking our approach to time and adopting a long-term, abundant view of our most precious resource could help us improve our work lives dramatically.

World-building is the process that speculative fiction writers use to think through the setting—geographical, cultural, personal—they’re creating for a story. Tara speaks with artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols about her personal practice of world-building, and how we might approach rethinking work with world-building as a tool.

The way things are is not the only way things could be. Strange New Work imagines radically different work futures through speculative fiction. Think space travel, exoplanets, artificial intelligence, and—yes—aliens. All that “strangeness” helps us break out of the constraints of the present and break into a whole new way of thinking about work.