Beyond Institutions: Imagining Futures That Belong to Us

by Suneet Pansare

Source: The Fifth Sacred Thing

We live in a world built on institutions. Hospitals heal us. Schools teach us. Governments protect us. Corporations employ us.

These systems have organised our lives so deeply that they feel inevitable. We are born into them, move through them, and measure success by their standards. They give shape to the modern world, but also limit it.

What if they are not the only way? What if the futures worth imagining are not about repairing or reforming institutions, but about moving beyond them altogether?

For most of human history, life was non-institutional. Care was rooted in community. Learning was apprenticeship and storytelling. Justice was negotiated through kinship and reputation. Institutions are not natural, they are relatively new inventions.

And while they stabilise complexity, they also centralise power. They shape our imaginations to believe that expertise, legitimacy, and authority live “out there” in bureaucracies and buildings, rather than in us, between us, and through us.

Maybe it’s time to imagine otherwise.

The Weight of Institutionalisation

Healthcare saves lives, yet it often alienates people from their own bodies. Doctors become gatekeepers. Patients become cases. The body becomes a machine to be fixed, rather than a living system to be understood. The system is extraordinary at treating illness, but less capable at sustaining wellbeing.

Education transforms curiosity into credentials. The classroom becomes a sorting mechanism. Grading becomes a proxy for learning. Most people don’t stop learning because they lose interest, but because the institution drains the joy from it.

Governance promises participation, yet often delivers distance. The very idea of “representation” can create a gap between citizens and decision-makers. People feel spoken for rather than listened to. Decisions are made in closed rooms even as our tools for open dialogue grow more powerful.

Institutions stabilise. But they also freeze imagination. They reward compliance, not creativity. They make us forget that there are other ways of organising care, knowledge, and power.

Seeds of Non-Institutional Futures

What if the future was not built on institutions, but on relationships, networks, and practices?

Health as Communal Practice

Care that begins in neighbourhoods and families. Imagine local herbal gardens, collective wellbeing circles, or digital platforms that connect healers horizontally, rather than through centralised systems. Health becomes something we cultivate together, not something outsourced to experts.

Learning Without Schools

Lifelong micro-communities of curiosity. Learning as rhythm, not phase. Parks, makerspaces, and digital guilds could become the classrooms of tomorrow. Instead of degrees as proof of value, trust could emerge through contribution, creativity, and shared practice.

Economies of Mutual Care

We already see glimpses of this in community-supported agriculture, open-source projects, and time banks. In these spaces, value is not extracted but shared. A non-institutional economy thrives on reciprocity, where wealth is measured in relationships as much as in currency.

Governance as Collective Sensemaking

Imagine assemblies, citizen juries, or AI-assisted deliberation platforms where decision-making is a continuous, distributed dialogue. Governance becomes less about fixed structures and more about ongoing participation. Authority is not concentrated, but dispersed.

These are not utopias. They are fragments already visible in the present. The challenge is to notice them, nurture them, and grow them.

Letting Go of Institutional Habits

Why is it so difficult to imagine life beyond institutions? Because they are not just structures, they are habits of thought. They promise predictability, identity, belonging. Even when they frustrate us, they give us a sense of order in an uncertain world.

To move beyond them is not to destroy them. It is to dissolve their monopoly on legitimacy. It is to re-root trust and care in human-scale relationships. To remember that authority can live in households, in communities, in networks.

This shift requires more than new systems, it requires new imaginations. As the world grows too complex for centralised systems to manage, resilience may not come from larger institutions but from smaller scales. From the local. From the peer-based. From the relational.

The next revolution may not be institutional reform. It may be institutional release.

© Suneet Pansare, 2025

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Suneet Pansare is a Design and Foresight Strategist who operates at the intersection of design strategy and futures, enabling organizations not only to imagine possible futures but also to co-design future-ready solutions, explore new opportunity areas, and navigate uncertainties. With approximately five years of experience, he has collaborated with organizations across multiple industries such as insurance, banking, airlines, hospitality, and energy. Suneet holds a Master’s degree in Design from the MIT Institute of Design and a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester.