A survey asked Americans what time period they would want to live in and found that:
40 percent said they would prefer to live in the present,
45 percent would prefer to live at some point in the past.
14 percent would prefer to live at some point in the future.
Overall, 20 percent said they would have liked to live 50 or more years in the past, while 25 percent said they would like to live less than 50 years in the past.
Just 9 percent would rather live 50 years or more.
I understand the hesitancy of living in the future. Uncertainty is something people tend to avoid, so not knowing how things turn out in two or three or five decades can be frightening.
Maybe artificial intelligence has taken over the world.
Or climate change has radically altered life.
Or perhaps the Jets have won three Super Bowls in a row.
Disterous times.
I’d remind those people that the future is always just a second away, so we’re always living on its cusp, but I get it. Uncertainty is worrying.
But living sometime in the past? Maybe these people are hoping to live among deceased friends and relatives, or perhaps they don’t realize that Family Ties is available to stream on Pluto TV.
Chaelie thinks the 1980s were a fantastic decade to be alive, and he’s not wrong.
It was a glorious decade.
But I reminded him that more than twice as many people smoked in the 1980s as they do today, and smoking was literally everywhere:
Restaurants, airplanes, hospitals, offices, malls, teacher lounges… everywhere.
Also, no one wore helmets.
Few wore seatbelts.
Bigotry toward gay Americans was mainstream.
Drunk driving was rampant and socially acceptable.
On-demand anything did not exist.
Also, you couldn’t know anything.
Want to know how James Garfield died?
What are the names of Mars’ two moons?
Who invented the hair dryer?
You’d need to read a book. Except that finding the right book, absent the internet, was also practically impossible.
If the item you wanted wasn’t within 20 square miles of your home, you probably couldn’t purchase it.
We knew nothing in the 1980s.
As for me, I waver between the present and the future. I’m inclined to remain in the present, but a small part of me would like to move a century or two into the future.
I have faith that humanity will endure, and I’m deeply curious about what the future will look like, but I think that, despite all our troubles, the present is pretty great, too.
