The majority of people will drift back to their baseline mood of cheery or curmudgeonly, even after seismic events
Has there ever been an easier time to be a futurist? I’m distrustful of the profession at the best of times, since it involves making pronouncements about a time that hasn’t arrived – and not being held to account for your errors when it does arrive, because then it’s no longer the future, and thus no concern of the futurists. But these days, as the world staggers uncertainly out of lockdown, it’s even easier. All you need to say is that in life in general, or in whatever field you’re supposedly expert, everything’s going to change. Education, the economy, travel, work, dating, sport, the advertising industry, the world of aluminium can manufacturing: recent stories have promised massive transformation in them all. Or as a great sage (on the groundbreaking satire The Day Today) put it a quarter of a century ago: “If you’ve got a history book at home, take it out, throw it in the bin – it’s worthless.”
My objection isn’t that any of this is necessarily false. (Although taken literally, it is, because history never unfolds in absolutes: for example, it’s always jarring to be reminded that most people spent the Great Depression in work, not unemployed.) Rather, it’s the implication that life, in years to come, is going to feel very different indeed. And one of the few things we can be pretty sure of is that it won’t. For most of us, most of the time, it’ll feel normal.
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