What we Lose from a Failure of Imagination

November 14, 2025

by Dr. Mya Fisher

Childhood: The Training Ground of Imagination

When I was little, I didn’t have all the toys I wanted. What kid does?
So I created my own.

Using my imagination wasn’t just entertainment — it was an early education in possibility. I wrote stories. I built pillow and blanket forts in my grandma’s living room. I created worlds where I ran a business — operating a dry cleaners, or a restaurant in the basement complete with handwritten menus and frisbees as plates for my hungry customers. I even choreographed routines to teach my imaginary dance class.

Imagination taught me to see beyond what was visible — to stretch the boundaries of what was given and to believe that limits aren’t walls, but invitations: to push further, dream bigger, and grow stronger. Like any muscle, the more I used it, the more capacity it built — to imagine, to create, and to believe there’s always something more than what my eyes can see.

I have absolutely no doubt that my life has been richer because of the early development of my imagination. That kind of imaginative muscle — combined later with a fantastic public K–12 education, an undergraduate experience that honed my critical thinking, and an education in effective writing — became the foundation of how I move through the world. It helped me see connections between what is and what could be.

And while I sometimes feel like a unicorn for still thinking this way, I know I’m not alone.
But I do see this way of thinking becoming more rare than common — and my heart is heavy seeing it slowly drain from the world.
Because when imagination disappears, something essential in us does too.

The Shrinking of Imagination

Lately, I find myself wondering where our collective imagination has gone.

I see it in classrooms, where bright college students struggle to envision anything beyond what’s been handed to them — a career path, a rubric, a script for success. I see it in politics, where leaders seem incapable of anticipating cruelty or creativity from the other side, forever shocked by outcomes that could have been predicted with a little imaginative empathy — or, at the very least, attention.

Everywhere, we’re surprised by what, in my mind, should have been predictable.

And that’s what troubles me most — this collective astonishment at things we should have seen coming. As children, our imaginations were endless. The stories we read and watched taught us to imagine whole worlds: heroes and villains, courage and consequence, good intentions gone wrong, and second chances found in unexpected places. Those stories stretched our empathy — they trained us to see from multiple points of view, to expect complexity, and to believe that choices had ripple effects.

But somewhere along the way, that expansive imagination — the kind that made us curious, cautious, and compassionate — began to shrink.

It’s ironic, really. As someone who’s watched more movies than I can count, I can predict how most of them will end within the first five minutes. There are no truly new stories in Hollywood. So why, in real life, are we so often caught off guard?

How is it that we can anticipate a movie plot but not recognize the patterns of harm, neglect, or injustice that play out again and again before our eyes?

The failure of imagination isn’t a lack of creativity — it’s a loss of empathy and anticipation. It’s forgetting how to see ourselves in others and how to trace cause and effect in the stories we’re living now. It’s what happens when we stop asking “what if” and start assuming “this is just the way things are.”

If you can’t imagine a different world, you can’t build one.
And if you can’t imagine someone else’s experience, you can’t protect them from harm.

Why This Matters Now

Our politics, our classrooms, our workplaces — they’re all running low on imaginative fuel. We overvalue reaction and undervalue reflection. We reward efficiency over curiosity. We cling to what’s familiar, even when it’s no longer working.

But the past few years gave us a master class in what happens when we have no choice but to change.

The pandemic stripped away our allergy to risk. It forced us to shed old modes of thinking and habits that had long gone unquestioned. The way things had worked in the “before times” suddenly failed us — systems, routines, and assumptions collapsed under the weight of reality.

So we had to imagine differently.

We reconfigured classrooms and workspaces, redefined community, reimagined what connection, care, and productivity could look like. We tried things — not all of them worked, but some did. And in that messy process, we learned that progress doesn’t always arrive as a breakthrough; sometimes it comes in increments, through trial and recalibration.

Every disruption, as I’ve written before, is both a mirror and a rehearsal. It reflects what isn’t working — and rehearses how we might respond better next time.

That’s what imagination does at its best: it trains us to prepare, to sense, to adapt. It allows us to test ideas before the crisis forces our hand. It’s how we strengthen the civic muscle of foresight and the emotional muscle of empathy.

If we let that lesson fade — if we treat the pandemic as an anomaly rather than a teacher — we’ll lose more than memory; we’ll lose readiness and the childlike wonder of possibility.

Getting Our Imagination Back

When I say we need to get our imagination back — like Stella and her groove — I don’t mean in a nostalgic, whimsical sense.
I mean as a civic discipline: a muscle we train through use until it’s strong enough to hold both reality and hope.

Imagination, after all, is what lets us see the world not only as it is, but as it could be — and what helps us prepare for what it might become.

To be clear, this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky fantasy we can wait to happen to us. It’s not something we can leave for others to figure out. No one else is going to do it for us.

This is our mantle. Our responsibility. Our collective calling as citizens — members of this vast, imperfect, and interconnected community we call society.

Getting our imagination back means daring to think in big ideas again — to take risks, to build, to collaborate, to dream out loud — even when the outcomes are uncertain.
We cannot let fear keep us from even trying.

Because change never begins in comfort, and imagination is the opposite of resignation.

We need to marshal the same energy and excitement we once poured into the worlds of Transformers, She-Ra, G.I. Joe, and Fraggle Rock — when imagination made everything possible — and channel it toward reimagining a society that benefits the greatest number of people, not maintaining one where the smallest number benefit the most.

It’s not a small task — it’s an essential one.

Because imagination doesn’t belong to a few; it belongs to all of us.
And if each of us strengthens that muscle — individually and together — we can build systems that last, leaders who listen, and communities that adapt with care.

That’s not child’s play.
It’s survival.

This reflection is part of an ongoing conversation on imagination, empathy, and civic possibility.

Join the discussion on LinkedIn — and share your thoughts:

What’s one system, habit, or tradition you’d reimagine if you could start over?