Let’s imagine our future
Crystal balls, crystal balls, everywhere, but not a pinch of premonition to trust!
Crystal balls, crystal balls, everywhere, but not a pinch of premonition to trust!
We love predicting, don’t we? In fact, the whole world (read: the financial system) is acutely dependent on our betting skills. Guessing beforehand who’s going to be successful and who’s going to flop is what boosts the engine of capitalism. Knowing the present isn’t enough, not just because it’s immensely fickle, but also because the future is always going to be larger than the past. The answers lie in the future. No pun intended.
If we sit to break down what we are up to, the answer that’s common to every passing generation is “We are doing better than those who arrived before us!” when we can all agree that that’s not exactly true. Yes, there are some commendable aspects from our present but overall, the future is where things could get phenomenal. Despite our consistent rate of disappointment followed by regret, it’s worth assuming that the future looks bright, mainly thanks to our optimistic nature more than anything else.
Based on these preemptive criteria, here is how i envision the future to be like…err.. in the future:
Technology shall reign supreme if it isn’t already. There’s not going to be a single area of human endeavour wherein technological conquests won’t leave their thumbprints. It’s possible to imagine a world without Saudi oil but a gadget-less world is far from happening. Until we reach a point where our device-related waste would pile up such that we either leave the planet a la WALL·E (2008) or turn against technology in revolt. Worst case scenario would be dumping our electronic waste on Mars while continuing to stick with Earth. Wonder how Elon Musk’s ghost would feel about that.
Little kids’ fascination with toys has more to do with parents than the kids themselves. Babies don’t slip out of their mothers screaming for a Barbie doll. It’s the parents who can’t think of anything intelligent for their offspring to spend their early years with. In the future, with the unbridled rise of sex toys, the innocence associated with dolls will ebb and we’ll step into a world where dolls don’t mean what Mattel would like us to believe today.
Urban is clearly winning over Rural. Accordingly, the ethos the former drags into human dynamics are fast losing ground. It’s not OK to be interested in others unless there is an agenda in place. You can’t go and ask somebody whether they are fine, in a city, the way villagers do back home. Privacy has turned into a euphemism for self-imposed distance. Smiling at a stranger makes you a creep and you cram the same scary principles in to your children’s head too. So, this behavioral evolution might lead us to a future where everybody is so fucking cold that we’d successfully beat global warming.
People used to die of diseases like typhoid (shiver to death), tuberculosis (cough to death), cholera (shit to death), etc. in the old days. Some people still do but the density of casualty caused by these diseases have dropped exponentially since the dawn of the 20th century. As of now, we are becoming more and more familiar with problems like heart attacks and cancer. They happen to everybody around you. You don’t have to be the chosen one anymore to end up with a pacemaker or chemotherapy. Which also makes you wonder whether those who died before us didn’t really know what they were dying from. Maybe the science wasn’t prolific enough to understand the diagnosis, let alone the prognosis. In the future, we’ll have fancier diseases emanating from the way we lead our life. For instance, those who haven’t been to a place of worship in ages would be having something called Bow Syndrome—I just made this up, like the rest of the blog post — which is basically the result of bowing to your smartphone all day long instead of your god.
There’ll be enormous strides in medicine. So much so the vaccination against stupidity would finally hit the market and everybody will be cured instantaneously. The downside of this development would be borne by those who thought they were stupid but weren’t in reality.
Kindness would be appreciated in the not-so-distant future. To the point that it will be commodifed into a product with remarkable marketing to boot. If you feel hiring fake guests at a south Korean wedding is weird or paying for a cuddle partner in Japan is preposterous, wait for the future when premium kindness would be normal as well as taxable.
The Scandinavian countries, having realized they are nearly half a century ahead of their fellow-countries, might end up attempting what nobody else could. Lack of problems can be a problem too, you see? They might go ahead and declare assholery as a criminal offence, thus paving the way for the very redefinition of crime and punishment.
Robots will rule us, eventually. The only difference being, unlike our previous masters, they won’t know how to divide and rule. So, they’ll end up uniting us against them. We’d finally rise above our petty differences like faith, nationality, caste, creed, salary, gender, class, sexual orientation, dietary habits, phone model, etc. Spoiler: The robots will win in the end but not before witnessing the much-awaited unification of the human race.
What gets you through the day? Before you make lousy guesses, let me deliver you the answer: the power to laugh at others as well as yourself. You don’t need an artistically crafted joke to chortle yourself pink. Anything and everything around you takes place so that you can find an excuse to laugh and get over yourself. You are not THAT important. You never were and never will be. However, in the future, nobody would bother to crack jokes in the real world. Humour would be restricted to the successor of the Internet. Online only please. LOLMAX.
No matter where we are—2050 or 2075 or 2100 — Earth or Mars or Pluto — people will continue to fall in love. Not necessarily with each other but with whatever warms the cockles of their dark dark heart. It’d be the one emotion that shall remain sacred. Everything else, from pride to disgust to lust, would go to crap, where they essentially belong.
After suffering the scourge of organized religions for centuries, finally a new religion would be embraced by the so-called third world. Development. Within no time, it would defeat all other faiths and emerge stronger than all of them combined, ultimately becoming the only religion left in the world. Or whatever is left of it.
Alcohol, sugar and cigarettes are for pussies. Web would be the real height of addiction. Subsequently enough, groups like Timeline Anonymous and Catfish Anonymous and Selfie Anonymous would be quietly blooming everywhere. Similarly, Parkour would be a bony relic of broken past as Attention would fast emerge as THE extreme sport.
We’ll move beyond apps. But not before every single breathing homo sapien on this planet has suckled it teats. Once that is done, we’ll enter the realm of superapp. Which is basically you thinking of an app and it getting automatically downloaded on your supersmartassphone. Your life shall remain fucked up, yes, but it’ll be awesomely fucked up.
I can go on and on and on and on about how the future will be like. Regardless, the truth remains in our collective obliviousness. We really don’t know what’s going to happen and when or how. We are just moving along the herd lest we got left behind. To make matters worse than required, unlike our predecessors, we aren’t even interested in history. Which is why we are going to continue to repeat our repeated mistakes again and again. Boring shit. Bah. Deservedly so though. Speaking of which, if at all there is anything we need to invent in the future, then it must be a crystal ball that would help us peek into our past. We clearly don’t remember a hell lot of it.