This comedy blog post was made possible by Patreon. One of the rewards for becoming a Patreon backer is suggesting a topic for the blog. A kind patron named Jesse McClusky gave me the fun, exciting, terrifying, and funexerrifying suggestion of thinking ahead to our future. To the amazing year of 2022!
2022 is less than a decade from now as I write this in the ancient, backwards time of summer 2014, but I suspect the world will be a very different place by 2022. I believe humankind will discover the ideal number of bullet points for a listicle is exactly 25. So please enjoy these 25 predictions about our future!
Social Media
There will be many new and different social media sites and apps. You will get messages like this and they will make perfect sense to you: Hey! Your netherport just got jazzled by a froolee on TimeFukr!
Spider-Man Age
A movie detailing Spider-Man’s origin story is released every two to three months. People no longer tell one another how old they are in years. We speak about our age in relation to how many Spider-Man reboots have been released in our lifetime. In 2022, I am 87 Spider-Man Reboots Old.
Who Farted?
All personal mobile devices come pre-loaded with an app that lets you know who in your immediate vicinity has farted. Strangely, this has not stopped humans from loudly asking, “WHO FARTED?” and enjoying the thrill of shaming other humans for a normal bodily function.
Food Free
There is a new diet craze called “Food-Free.” Some people on Facebook who read some studies once finally realized that eating food was the cause of all of our health and appearance problems. It’s commonly agreed in polite society that eating is gross and weird and no one should ever do it. That said, the world is covered in “secret,” illicit food speakeasies. Common passwords include “What the fuck is wrong with us?”, “I’m dying”, and “I would kill everyone I know for a taco.”
People are still mad about Star Wars
Not a lot to explain about this one. Some things never change.
Reality Goggles
There’s a special piece of headwear that blocks out screens of any kind. All you can see is the beauty of the real world–the soaring server cathedrals, the grand canyon physical media dump, and the strips malls full of Forever 21 (still around!) and the personal fracking stations. There is a glitch where the goggles think cats only belong on the internet and shouldn’t exist in the real world so the goggles also make it impossible to see or hear actual real life cats. These goggles are only available to the very rich.
Swear words
“Comcast” is now the most offensive thing you can call another human being.
Taco Bell
Because of our new understanding of food, Taco Bell no longer sells tacos. They sell bells. Bells are a common form of communication for pundits on CNN. When a plane goes missing or something, cable stations will now air weeks of people angrily ringing bells at one another.
Time Travel
Time travel exists. You can only jump two or three seconds back into the past. Time travel is mainly used to manipulate the accuracy of the “Who Farted?” app.
Toilet Talk
Every single object you use in life will instantly send a message to all of your social media accounts updating your friends on your activities. The devices will also speak to you. Every morning, your coffeemaker will ask you want it can do for you. Every human in the world answers the same way: “Make me some coffee, for fuck’s sake!”
Phone Calls
The calling function on our mobile devices is now referred to as The Mother’s Day App.
Memes
A lot of memes are very old now. No one can remember how some of them started. For example, when you get married the photographer automatically adds a caption to the bottom of every photo of the couple that says #TrueDetectiveSeason2. No one knows why, but hey, it’s tradition. And tradition is important.
NSA buddies
The future is not a lonely place. Every living human is assigned an NSA Buddy. It’s understood that everything you ever do will be monitored, recorded, and possibly used against you by the United States of America and Time Warner Cable’s elaborate government apparatus. But voter/content consumer comfort is the USATWC’s number one concern so every day we get a call on our Mother’s Day App from our NSA Buddy to shoot the breeze. It’s kind of nice, really. My NSA buddy’s name is Sheryl and she also enjoys getting mad about Star Wars.
Earbuds
Earbud cables are the leading cause of death. Every year, two million people are caught in a cascading tangle of earbuds. It’s sort of like that old video game Katamari Damacy but with earbuds and death. The problem is particularly bad down in the subway tunnels where the trains used to run and the mutants now live.
Netflix is a dating site
Netflix’s complex algorithms determine not only what TV show we would like to watch, but who we should marry and/or have sex with. The suggestions were weird at first: I see you’re interested in straight men. Perhaps you’d also like to try married women, a Benedict Cumberbatch body pillow, or dying alone. Eventually, Netflix got pretty good at it though and now all couples are pretty happy because you’ll never end up with someone who doesn’t want to watch all of Buffy The Vampire Slayer in one sitting.
Intelligence Captioned
Everything that is broadcast is captioned so even the stupidest people know what’s happening when they watch old episodes of Game of Thrones with their Netflix assigned partner. It’s pretty fun to watch the CNN bell-ringers with the intelligence caption on as it just repeatedly reads, “This jack-ass is ringing a bell.”
Cat Pictures
Cat pictures MUST be posted daily on facebook whether you have a cat or not. This is not mandated by any law but by common societal agreement.
Dinosaurs
The dinosaurs came back. It’s a long story about chemical spills and a horrible accident with the development of the time travel app, but it’s cool. The dinosaurs don’t usually come into the cities because they’re afraid of the earbud traps.
The Environment
The Polar Ice Caps melted. But we stopped it. A fundraiser was staged in which everyone in America was forced to sing “Let It Go” from Frozen at the exact same time. It made the top page of UberReddit. We’re told that fixed the problem.
Equality
People are still jerks to one another, but for the most part we’re much better about treating one another with kindness and respect regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc. That said, we’re total assholes to one another based on dumb personal preferences recorded on social media. Over 10,000 people and their triceratops steeds lost their lives in the Soft Shell-Hard Shell Wars of 2019. It seems like no matter what, humans will find stupid ways to divide themselves. I posted that sentiment on Google Plus and 17 people +1’d it, so I know I’m not alone.
Lightsabers are real
We discovered the technology to make actual lightsabers. Fifty percent of the population immediately cut their own arms off while making YouTube videos. The technology is now banned. It was only available and legal for four hours.
The Middle Class
There is no middle class. You are on Team Poor or Team Rich and that’s it. Our economy is entirely based on a complex system of TheoryCredits administered by PayPal and Chipotle so we all just kind of keep living but we’re not sure how. There is a shit-ton of bell ringing about that on CNN.
Google Plus
Everyone still hates Google Plus, but we all have to post to it at least once a day or they’ll send a Google Drone to our house and destroy it with their patented death device–the Google Fun Times Correction Integrator.
Religion
We kind of have separation of church and state. Not as much as I would like, but it’s a step in the right direction. Politicians still invoke their religion all the time, but it’s now bleeped out. So during campaigns you’ll hear people say things like, “I was compelled by (bleep) to lower taxes!” As you can imagine, it gives us a lot to tweet about.
Fun
I think I’m starting to make it sound like the future is a bad place. Full of totalitarian social media regimes, forced interaction, horrible violence, mysterious subway mutants, and talking toilets but there are a lot of good things, too!
We still have families. We still have friends. In fact, one of the most popular social media apps is RealFriendster where you only add people you actually care about. It’s weird and beautiful.
We also still engage in a lot of great physical activities. We all learned to run when the dinosaurs came back. We all learned to be really good climbers during the sudden sinkhole craze of 2016. We have jetpacks but no one bothers to use them because of the acid cloud.
We still experience love. We still pine for the past and hope for the future. Most of us have cool cybernetic replacement limbs as a result of the lightsaber menace.
And we still spend a lot of time outside. The number one hobby in the world is Social Media War Re-enactment. A lot of us spend holidays and weekends out in the woods edutaining ourselves about the great battles of the past. Everyone argues about who gets to play Patton Oswalt. Everyone is bummed out when they have to be Ann Coulter. No one knows why we go out to the woods to do it. It seemed like a good idea to someone and the rest of us ran with it.
I’d like to say more, but I really don’t think I’m going to find a better sentence to explain the future than the sentence I just wrote above.
It seemed like a good idea to someone and the rest of us ran with it.
Thanks and enjoy the past!
If you enjoyed the post, check out my Patreon page! Thanks again to Jesse McClusky for the suggestion and thank you for reading and sharing the post!
