The World I want to live in is not between the Past and the Future

There is nothing like a quiet afternoon on a Sunday with an early 90s or 2000s movie on the TV, sitting on the sofa with a belly full of home-cooked meal. It does remind me of my college days in my family home, watching movies with headphones on, as a new crisis of the day takes over us all. It was a bittersweet time, and Sunday afternoons like these remind me of such times where life was hopeful and complicated enough to be solved by the hopeful romantics. We had to make progress and innovate ourselves out of good times.

Today, innovation has become a curse word. It is left to a few elites to solve all the problems of our world and charge us a premium to enjoy the benefits of it all. Where does it all end? I know there is no utopia waiting for us all, and if it is, I am not subscribed to it. Probably, couldn’t afford the annual subscription that unlocked the benefits. What I am trying to say is that everything that is remotely worth using as a service either costs a lot of money or is hell-bent on using its users as a byproduct. There comes a moment where every time I get a notification about some monthly subscriptions debiting money from my account, I look back on the time when I actually paid money for my preferences and taste rather than just keeping up with the options I might use, maybe visit once a week, or even a month. It pinches a bit more when I have experienced this life of a digital tenant as a resident of three different countries in the past decade. When I look back on it, I have no recollection of anything I actually possessed for all the money I spent on services I experienced. As I am struggling to transfer my playlists or movie collections from streaming platforms in one geolocation to another, the collection I paid for, I am thinking to myself, how did I even get to this stage?

Looking back on the time when I was in college, and let’s say for this post, I was ripping CDs to load my iPod with my music, I spent so many hours meticulously selecting my playlist and curating every song. I might still have that collection somewhere on a hard drive but that’s a treasure hunt for some other time. The nostalgia of it all made me crave for more times like those and maybe go back to the time where mix tapes and playlists were evidence of an individual’s taste in music, that could be shared between friends, old and new. It makes me eager to build a future for younger generations so they can experience something similar to what I did.

I don’t know what kind of future we are building, but it is not a promising one for the younger generations looking to build and own their life and personalities. Maybe this AI bubble can burst once and for all, and we can go back to the golden age of having possessions that emphasize our taste and personalities. A time where each one of us, with their unique charm, can rebuild a world worth exploring for generations to come after us. It is such a crazy concept that the one thing that seeks to destroy the very essence of humanity might end up destroying itself to save it. One can only hope.

Look, it's not all doom and gloom. I feel hopeful that the world is in good hands if we keep it full of arts and imagination. A world full of creativity breeds hope for happier times and, in turn, more creativity. A dystopian nightmare disguised as a promising future, fueled by billionaires who have eluded reality for most of their lives, can only end one way, and it is not pretty for us, the common folk. The only way I like to look at our current state is that the present is not the life we all hoped for, but the past is too long gone, and the future is still some ways ahead; might as well pass through the times with a song in our hearts.