The Future: a Pessimist's Guide to the Unhappened

Photo Illustration by Sage Nenyue | VOX Staff

By Sage Nenyue | VOX Staff

I used to have a perfect vision of the future: shiny buildings with rounded edges tower over limitless sidewalks. Up in the sky, higher than any of the buildings, is a river of cars that take well-meaning citizens to their well-meaning jobs. Everything is meticulously clean and sparkling as robot cleaners are on their jobs, always ready to please. The sun shines brightly over the planet. Global warming has been proven a myth. The sea and air are crystal clear. The continents have been connected with extremely wide bridges that people live and travel along. All forms of life are flourishing. I don’t see the future like this any more.

As I grow older, it looks less impressive: Those shiny smooth buildings that were immaculately clean will gather spot after spot until they pollute the air. And the people, unused to diseases, will begin to get sick and die prematurely. The government is going to let some big secret slip, and all those well-meaning people are going to be pissed off. They will strike and revolt. The government will strike back, bringing out artillery the masses didn’t know existed. A few brave rebels will band together and rewire the household robots to fight back. Animals will die in the crossfire.

A few years down the line, the paranoid government will begin to see other continents as threatening. They will destroy the bridges, along with the social bridges, bringing down everyone who lived on them. And more people will die.

The corporations that survived the terrible human-government fallout will save many people. They will clothe, feed and give shelter to the survivors. Things will be rebuilt, though not as extravagantly. But then, as expected, the corporations will grow, stop their charity and return to capitalism. The middle class will disappear, and the lower class will include everyone except the elite few with tight ties to these companies.

People of the lower class will sit in front of their ransacked homes with glazed eyes and hopelessness on their dirt-laden faces. Since they must always be on alert for a penny or a spare scrap of food, they have no time for fun. They can’t even spare a few hours for escapism, lest they risk being robbed or killed. Death is the only true escape.

I am not a prophet, but anyone can imagine such a future with the way we live now. All we do is try to get the best for ourselves and outdo each other. Capitalism emphasizes gaining the maximum profit for the minimum effort; if you’re poor, you can only get poorer.

It’s not that I’m against people getting the biggest bang for their buck. It’s just that I’m against people getting the biggest bang for their buck at the expense of other people, like con artists who make money by fooling the elderly into giving away their life savings or firms that monopolize a market and then inflate the prices.

I’m disgusted with the way we Americans live. We bully other countries with our big guns and try to dismantle countries that have bigger guns than us. We starve other countries (Yes, I’m talking about Cuba). We destroy forests, waste food and focus on stupidity instead of what actually matters (because Lindsay Lohan’s drunk driving totally dwarfs civil wars in Africa or famine in third world countries). I’m also saddened by the fact that most of our activists — the anti-war protesters and people who claim to fight for what they believe in — are so weak-willed nowadays. It’s like the “boob-tube” and the club-pumping music have drained their will to act against what is wrong.

It also doesn’t help that as a generation, we have a tendency to find ways to escape life’s problems. We tend to take to alcohol, drugs and partying and to do the sort of stuff that generally shortens our life spans or causes misery. It’s a pathetic cycle, really.

Why are we so useless these days? As humans, we are like cancers on the face of the earth. We leech this beautiful planet of its resources and then complain when it retaliates with natural disasters and harms the very species that is harmful to it. And then we run away from all the horror we caused.
We get so angst-ridden and so depressed that we turn away from everyone and everything in favor of our preferred escapism: recreational drugs, pounding music or other obsessions of choice.

There really isn’t a way to break this cycle. At this point, the most we can do is hope for the best in a hopeless situation.

Sage is a senior at Tech High.