Bristol Baughan, Founder of Regenerative Media Lab (RMLab), is a writer, professional leadership coach and executive producer of Emmy®-winning and Oscar®-nominated films. She is a member of the Dot Connector Studios Collaboratory and founded Inner Astronauts and the RMLab to facilitate a shift from extractive toward more regenerative ways of being. She is on faculty at the Esalen Institute and has delivered talks at TED, TEDx, HATCH Europe and the Sundance Film Festival. Her writing has been featured in SaveWright, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, The Huffington Post and PBS. She is currently writing her first memoir, Aliveness: The Side Hatch. She is a TED Fellow and holds a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica in California, USA.
“Departure as an Arrival” by Bristol Baughan is a speculative fictional re-imagining of her own father's death in a culture where burnout is being addressed. This story was inspired by a Guild of Future Architects’ ‘Futurist Writer Room’, a collective imagining of speculative histories and futures. The story is her own.
This short story is a deeply personal, meditative journey through grief, transformation and the rediscovery of community. Her father, a workaholic doctor, never adapted to the new cultural understanding of burnout. The Community Resilience App (CRA) becomes a lifeline, weaving connections in times of need. Initially resistant, the narrator learns to embrace the communal support it offers. The CRA, born from a collective rejection of extractive capitalism, facilitates neighbourly aid and reshapes personal grief into shared resilience.
With her father’s passing, the narrator’s grief cracks her open, revealing a space. She reflects on her own relentless pursuit of productivity, inherited from her parents and culture, and begins to heal. This personal transformation parallels broader societal shifts: the recognition of burnout as systemic leads to legal and cultural changes, fostering a more humane work environment. Changed by her father's death and culture at large, the author co-creates a Regeneration Station, a community committed to sustainable living. Here, Indigenous knowledge and circular economies take precedence. In honouring her father’s memory, she places his belongings in the Transition Village, a sanctuary for elders, symbolising a confluence of past, present and future.
