It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.
Today that topic is…
What do you think the world will be like 25 years in the future?
A lot can happen in twenty-five years.
I know my little world has changed in ways that I never would have fathomed. And I think that is likely true for most anyone. Think about meeting yourself from twenty five years in the past, and vice versa, meeting yourself from twenty five years in the future.
Who the hell is that person? They are almost certainly unrecognizable. Twenty-five years can do a number on anyone.
On the other hand, the world? After twenty five years have passed again? The people of the world change. The technology of the world will seem like magic to us. The politics will be damn near unrecognizable. Every kid of that world has yet to be born and will not even be conceived until the 2030s or beyond.
The Kid turned 18 this year, which makes her an adult. The first time we took her out to a restaurant and she ordered a drink (you can drink at age 18 where we live) the waitress looked at her ID and exclaimed “but you were born in 2007!”
In 2007 I was only just getting my head around the idea of being a dad. Twenty-five years ago I still pretty much felt like a kid myself. Yuh. A lot can change in 25 years.
There are just a few days left in 2025 as I write this. The twenty-first century is one quarter over. The “kids” these days are mocking us people older than 25, reminding us frequently that we were “born in the 1900s” … what seems like a long time ago.
Next year I will turn 50 myself. That is twenty-five years twice, and it’s true what they say: you never really feel your age. I still feel twenty-five. (Tho my body sometimes behaves like its in its 70s, but that’s a different story.) I’ve only seen 25 years pass me by twice, and the first twenty-five were just mostly growing up and everything seemed pretty normal back then, I think because your brain is changing on the daily and twenty-five seconds or twenty-five years is all pretty much the same thing.
What will everything be like in 25 years in the future?
Prognostication, as it turns out, is something of a young man’s game.
I can tell you what things were like twenty-five years ago. Some of it is still fresh. Some of it catches me off guard. Turns out that many of my favourite movies are much older than twenty-five. I have books on my shelf I haven’t gotten around to reading that have been sitting there for twenty-five years. My house is nearly that old, which only serves to remind me on this freezing cold day that my furnace is the same age as my house and it could stop working any day now… or last another twenty-five years. Twenty-five years, as it turns out, can just as easily seem like twenty-five seconds. It’s all pretty much the same thing.
In twenty-five years a lot will change. A lot will stay exactly the same, too. Take your pick. What’s your perspective, I suppose. Are you looking in the mirror? Or are your looking at the horizon?
I don’t feel like I’ve changed much but 2024 is barely recognizable to me at the moment. Five years ago seems like a dream. Stepping backwards into 2001? Hell, I rung that new years in on a cruise ship on a vacation with my family (the one and only cruise we ever took) and that is so long ago it seems as much a blur as reality. That year itself? I can’t even begin to remember it all.
I suppose my point, if I have one, is that twenty-five years is so abstract as to hardly matter to the day-to-day living that needs doing—and yet planning and thinking about twenty-five years passing reminds us, too, that planning for a world that will have changed so much as to be unrecognizable to even ourselves, and yet eerily familiar, is vital to getting there at all.
So? What do I think the world of 25 years of the future will look like? Different, and that’s pretty much all I can be certain of.
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