In the year 2000, I was hiding canned food in my closet in preparation for the apocalypse. I was convinced societal collapse was imminent. When it didn’t happen, I turned my attention back to my PlayStation and Nintendo 64 and went back to being amazed by where technology was heading.
Metal Gear Solid was a favorite. There was so much technology in it, but there was also so much life happening around that technology. For all its strange machinery and dangerous possibilities, it was still a world I could recognize. Life could still be seen.
It’s 2026, and on the surface, remarkably little has changed. No flying cars overhead. No holographic displays lighting up the streets. The cyberpunk dystopia we were promised looks clean, minimalistic, and grey. We have cybernetic enhancements, though I swear I’ve only seen them on social media.
We have that. Social media. Something that started as a way to keep in touch with your friends and became a place where everyone is expected to build a personal brand. Even being yourself feels like something you’re supposed to market.
The future, you see, has arrived. It is indeed very ghetto.
It pains me to see so many people absorbed in their phones. These devices can entertain us, keep us informed, and help us work and learn. That’s part of what makes this so frustrating. Something capable of doing so much keeps pulling us back to a feed where three or four seconds of video is enough before we’re reaching for the next thing.
A game could hold my attention for hours. The feed takes those same hours in three-second installments.
And I’m not exempt from any of this. I’m a slave to the damn thing, too, and I’m struggling to get out. Sometimes I want to scratch through the screen and break it, just to get back to a life where I read for pleasure, wrote to express myself, and found joy in other people and the hobbies I had. Things I still want to do, even while my thumb keeps moving.
The future I used to imagine had major advancements that allowed us to live better. Somewhere along the way, the technology got thinner, and I started having to fight harder for the things I thought it would give me more time to enjoy.
I think about Metal Gear Solid and how life in that universe sometimes seems more interesting, even with all its danger, than this sad, cold mess where fear is manufactured and misery is profitable. It’s a strange thing to find yourself missing the future you imagined while sitting in the one you got.
I thought the future would give us more life. I’m tired of how much of mine I have to fight to get back.
