The Anthropocene invites us to engage in alternative future-making. Many attempts to do so are underway in epistemic and practitioner communities. Such attempts may benefit from attention to the ways in which we conceive of futures in the first place. This paper outlines two distinct ways of conceiving futures: on the one hand, abstract, empty futures and, on the other, embedded, lived futures. Grounding our thinking in work by scholars of time, and from the field of futures studies, we contrast some assumptions underlying these two conceptions of the future. The former is integral to modern Western cultures, having underpinned much of the extraordinary growth in knowledge, technology, and economic activity that has brought us into the Anthropocene. The latter sees futures not simply as ours to shape at will but as embedded in relations of care and entanglement.

We briefly exemplify these two different ways of conceiving the future—and the tensions arising in their interrelation—by examining the case of Swedish “carbon farming” technologies, practices, and strategies. In this domain, conceptions of abstract, empty futures collide with conceptions of embedded, lived futures. Tensions emerge between, on the one hand, the pressure to produce practices that are comprehensible to carbon accounting systems and, on the other, farmers’ on-the-ground experimentation with regenerative farming practices, which require diverse knowledge practices and attention to more-than-human temporalities. Understanding different conceptions of futures and their role in local futures-making efforts may be crucial to grasping emerging possibilities in the Anthropocene.