LIFE IN THE FUTURE (LIFE MYSTIFIED)

Well, looks like this is it, eh? The Future, that is. This is the day we looked forward to when we were little. THE FUTURE, in Capitals and italics, no less. And, if it's a little disappointing, what can you do? Truth be told, our pasts weren't all that bright and shiny either, even though that is how we choose to remember them. If things were all that rosy back in the day we wouldn't have been looking forward to this future of ours so much then, would we? Be that as it may, this is the future and tomorrow will be too, so let's take stock of what we've gotten ourselves into.

Now, how far along in the future you are depends on how old you are, naturally. People in their twenties are still looking forward to their futures, unaware of the fact that the ordinary lives they lead now will someday transform themselves into some kind of Golden Age, at least in their minds. And so they forget to live their lives to the fullest, thinking things will fall into place later. People in their thirties are sort in the same boat but are already concocting the legends of their teens and twenties while they try to get their lives into some semblance of meaningfulness, maybe raising kids, paying lots of bills, trying to accomplish something or other, getting stressed and looking forward to some sort of stability and comfort in their futures.

When you hit your forties, you've done and seen a lot and hopefully have a feel for living. You've had your heart broken, experienced both triumph and failure, grief and elation, have met and interacted with all sorts of people and established once and for all (for better or worse) what kind of person you are. Your kids grow up, move out and start the whole cycle again for themselves and you hit your fifties. You figure at that point that this must be the future because after 50 you've got a hell of a lot of past accumulated, all sorts of memories and experiences competing for skull space in your memory banks, where they get sorted into short synopses of the high spots for the sake of order and self esteem. Some memories, even good ones, are too distant to be all that clear so you pick your story and stick to it, most of it real but not all of it by any means.

Even if you're not a person prone to getting obsessed about the future, you had some sort of vague notion of what it would be like. Well, this is what it is like. Exactly, no more, no less. Whatever it is you're doing or not doing with your life is that future you've always dreamed of. And of course it's nothing like you imagined it would be. That's not a good thing or a bad thing, just a fact thing. Things just never seem to feel the way you imagined they would when you were anticipating them. Take having sex. Turns out that was a whole lot better than even our active imaginations figured. Other things, while not being as dramatic as sex, were disappointing or tempered with the bland banality of reality. In other words, the anticipation was better than the realization.

There are those among us who never thought we'd live to see a Black
president in America and that cell phones and computers would link the world together in a Brave New Information Age. And who are appalled that 36,000 humans still die every single day from starvation and another 10 or 12 thousand from drinking unclean water. So you take the good with the bad, grateful you are not one of those people. There's still all kinds of nonsense wars being waged, two of them by America, so universal peace breaking out isn't part of anybody's future that happens these days. The space program sort of petered out into unmanned robots and endless satellite deployments after the exciting early years, so hotels in space, jet packs and automated homes are still in some distant future we'll never see. Cancer's still killing us at a good clip so that conquest of disease dream gets deferred too.

The global economy turned out to be just as fragile as it was in 1929, and almost as concentrated in the hands of the haves at the expense of the have-nots, which is what every war is really about, getting stuff you don't have from somebody who has stuff you want, no matter what any leader tells anybody the reason is. So the future is really an extension of yesterday, all our yesterdays that make up our past. Just another day in the life. Things change, but not overnight and not what you'd expect to change. While a lot of so-called futurists figured wrongly that we'd have air cars, robots, space colonies and undersea cities (why?) by now, no one predicted the Internet, personal computers, cell phones, the fall of the Soviet Union, the formation of the European Union with its Euro currency, the rise of terrorist jihad on a global scale, selling water in bottles for the same price as soda pop, 4 dollar cups of a bewildering variety of coffees or the rise of putrid reality TV shows.

While there's a lot of cool stuff that came our way, there's still no shortage of annoying crap that makes us look forward to some nebulous Utopian future where we'll all live in peace and harmony and enjoy a zipless fuck of an existence. This is also what makes us look backwards at the simpler time of our youth, in spite of the fact that nobody born within the past 2 centuries has lived in anything that could remotely be called "a simple time." History and progress started speeding up and swiftly changing the order of things during the 1800's and has been picking up more and more momentum ever since. You'd have to go back to the pre-machine age before the Industrial Revolution to find a time where change was very gradual and the world you were born into was not so different from the world in which you died. No more.

What is constant and familiar now is rapid change. There hasn't been a generation born in 200 years that wasn't bewildered by their own children; their likes and dislikes, their music, their clothes and their sense of the world. And every one of these generations of children have found their parents to be out of step with the new realities of the world. Change has gotten so rapid and pervasive that standing still draws criticism, no matter how worthwhile something already is: the thinking being that if it's not changing with the times then it must be hopelessly backwards and not very useful. So religions, moral codes of conduct and traditional beliefs of any sort are looked at with a jaundiced eye, so there goes those Rocks of Gibraltar in a turbulent world for many people.

Not that questioning many of these things wasn't called for. Religion was one of the forces that held humanity back for millennia, prohibiting scholastic investigation, medical innovation and of the exercise of the free will they all claim we have. Even today religion is behind most of the wars being fought, only it's not Christian-inspired wars for a change, but Islam-fueled bloodshed, which makes the misunderstanding between nations even wider, angering many Christian nations by stealing their act. What you have now is nations that used to be the targets of "Civilize the Savages with Jesus" warfare who got colonized and pillaged and now want to treat the world to the same., only this time in the name of Allah. You have to figure at this point that God, whatever his real name is, must be pretty pissed off at how much death has been inspired by his act of creation.

So that's another future dream still a long way off; mutual respect, good will and understanding. And so you start to abandon any thoughts of THE FUTURE in bright shiny capital letters and concentrate on today, which is the only reality we ever experience. You try to make THE NOW better, fill it with more love and more understanding and more peace and stop waiting for Utopia to spring into existence on its own. And you realize that love has more power than anything else that ever came down the pike. And you take or leave the gadgets as they come flying at us at breakneck speed and decide what you need and what you don't need for your life to feel good. Because deep down we all want to feel good, to do good and to be good, none of which has anything to do with "having it good." So, the future is now, and if it's not up to snuff, then we've got to change it now and not dream of Utopia or romanticize our pasts. It is right now we've got to be good to ourselves and one another. Love is still the greatest of all the commandments and the only Rock of Gibraltar left to us. Use it or lose it.