It finally happened–October 21st, 2015 came and went. But it was nowhere near the future Marty McFly visited in the second installment of the 1980’s trilogy “Back to the Future.” Today, we lack hover boards, and space-inspired clothes. Our cars don’t fly, and there are still far too many vintage cars on the road to allow our modern world to look as futuristic as it may actually be. But maybe that’s it; maybe the truly progressive future we find ourselves living in is hidden under the disguise of appearing rather ordinary. Entirely electric cars–something that must have been a mere idea twenty or thirty years ago–now mingle freely with gasoline and diesel cars on the interstate. We now have kids haranguing their parents for pocket computers, devices cutely covered in pocket-computer cozies and cases, pocket computers that now have more RAM power than the giant industrial computers of 30 years ago. In retrospect, the future we live in today is potentially more “futuristic” than the futures that were dreamed of in the past. However, the gradual nature of how the shift from then to now was made, the gradual nature of progress itself, makes it almost impossible to realize its occurrence at all.
One argument for the future tending to fail to live up to expectations is that we simply progress too slowly to make dramatic changes within society, and that the changes we make within society come in areas that weren’t foretold by the people of yesterday. And while the latter half of that statement does hold significant truth, the unrecognizable face of progress comes from the fact that it is continuous, and often times, happens so fast that we fail to register it completely. Progress is like time– no matter how hard society tries to put discrete intervals on it, and categorize its forward momentum, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it is indeed continuous. While it may not be of uniform speed at all times, it is undeniable that we are continually moving forward, whether or not we notice it at all. In the span of twenty years, we have moved from dial-up internet connection, to free wi-fi that is available nearly everywhere we go. And it is not as if we don’t recognize the changes– we utilize the changes, we expect the changes, we expect things to get sleeker, faster and better before we can even become accustomed to what we currently have. We expect the future to exceed our pre-existing expectations, regardless of how exorbitant and impossible they may be. And that is the problem– we cannot understand the progressive implications of the future we live in because we take it almost entirely for granted.
We have grown so accustomed to the rapid rate of change in this world that we have come to expect it. This speaks to the fact that our world has begun to change so rapidly that it is impossible to shed all normalcies of the past before we move on to the next big thing. The future is a difficult concept, simply because we are both living in and experiencing it, but also anticipating it at the same time. But more than anything, the future is an idea– it is a concept so abstract that it is impossible to fully understand. The real implications of the future lie in our perceptions of what is progress and what is not. It lies in whether or not our expectations have been exceeded.
Image Source: Kristian Bjornard
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