There have probably been times when you spent your afternoons daydreaming about different time periods, whether past or future. You imagine yourself as a pirate, out to rob ships. You imagine yourself in a futuristic utopia, experiencing things we can’t even imagine yet. In recent years, though, I’ve found myself doing that less and less.

Now, this could be due to the fact that, Zillenial that I am, I’m finally doing the growing up that I’ve been avoiding up until now and becoming a boring adult with no imagination. But to be perfectly honest I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I still daydream more than I’d like to admit and I don’t think I’m going to grow up until I’m at least 35.

Déjà Vu?

I think it’s because the times we live in are really interesting. In the last five years alone we’ve seen an amazing amount of historical events repeat themselves. A plague ravaging the world, the farmers rising up, war in the Holy Land, the doomsday clock reading 90 seconds to midnight, closer to annihilation than ever before, thanks to two Cold Wars at the same time and those are just the things I can list off the top of my head as I sit in this coffeehouse. Truly, I believe the amount of events on a geopolitical scale that I’ve witnessed in just the first third of my calculated 84.22 years of life expectancy is more than in any other 27 year period before it.

And in this flurry of information, two different, contradictory kinds of socio-cultural déjà vu present themselves: On the one hand I keep being reminded of the early 20th century with all its instability as empires crumble, the insignificance of the common person as a few powerful key players shape society and the general state of disarray and lack of a global response to the outbreak of the Spanish Flu during WWI. The other is the techno-optimist accelerationism of the atomic age. Boom after boom, hype after hype, from dotcom to crypto to AI to EVs to… you get the idea.

The Future Kinda Sucks

Looking at our daily lives now, it’s hard not to see the future we were sold as kids, once we recognize and break out of our Manufactured Normalcy Field that is. As I sit on an uncomfortable concrete bench on one of Vienna’s busiest shopping steets, taking puffs on the “blueberry” (really, I’m having trouble describing this flavor as anything other than “blue”) Cyberpunk Cigar and listening to some music I definitely would’ve called futuristic as a kid as I type this on my laptop, I can’t deny that it does feel like I’m living in the future, and to be perfectly honest, that future is almost exactly how I imagined it… at least on the technology front. And I don’t like it.

Thanks to great advances in augmentative and assistive technologies, between such things as cochlear implants and glucose monitors, cyborgs have long been walking among us. We all have communicators in our back pockets that can connect us to almost anyone or any piece of the breadth of collected human knowledge in seconds, and we use them to get addicted to attention-span-destroying short-form video content, read the short bits of mostly irrelevant information from our friends, or be jealous of the lifestyle they like to portray themselves having. Electric vehicles have long left the realm of sci-fi and a few clunky prototypes, but due to our heavy reliance on fossil fuels for electricity, this does us next to no good in terms of stopping climate change. Instead, the responsibility is placed on the individual. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology as much as the next person, but I feel like we have all the technology of the future without any of the social progress.

This Is Not a Call To Action

Now I could end this telling you it’s on you to change the world, to rise up and be the change you want to see but quite frankly that just doesn’t sit right with me. I could also tell you to live your life to the fullest and fuck tomorrow but that seems just as disingenuous. I could mollycoddle you because you’re insecure about whether you’re a failure (that’s for no-one but yourself to judge) or shit just sucks (it does) but that also wouldn’t do any good. Really the most I can offer is mildly encouraging cynicism.

It doesn’t get better but you do get duller to it. And if you put in a lot of hard work it probably won’t get any worse. Pick your battles, put yourself out there, take some chances, push yourself. If you’re not struggling you’re taking the easy route and selling yourself short.

ncl

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