Imaginable

In April of 2020, somewhere between the second and third wave of the pandemic, the World Bank called Jane McGonigal. The man on the line was Robert Hawkins, a senior executive who had once hired her to design a ten-week online simulation called EVOKE. That simulation had taken place a full decade earlier, in 2010, and it had asked roughly twenty thousand players to imagine the year 2020. A year shaped by a respiratory pandemic that began in China. A wave of conspiracy theorists who organized on social media. Historic wildfires across the American West. An electric grid that buckled under the strain of aging infrastructure and extreme weather. Hawkins had just been comparing the EVOKE storylines to his morning newsfeed. His question was direct and slightly stunned. "How did you get so much right?"

That phone call is the most quietly thrilling moment in *Imaginable*. McGonigal does not frame it as prophecy or a magic trick. She frames it as the natural result of doing one thing well, repeatedly, for fifteen years. Imagining specific, vivid, uncomfortable futures, and then living with them long enough for the brain to file them under "familiar." Her argument across the entire book is that this capacity, which she calls *imaginative fitness*, is trainable the way physical fitness is trainable. We have spent so long treating imagination as a personality trait that we have missed the obvious: it is a muscle, and most adults have not done a serious set since college. The rest of the book is, in effect, a gym membership. Ten rules, each one tied to a piece of neuroscience and a piece of homework, designed to lift your score on three baseline questions she will ask you in the first chapter and ask you again at the end.