By Tyler Karlberg
originally published on 11/22/22 for A Little Slack Publishing.
Growing up, I think we all had a good idea of what the future would hold, all of which was highly informed by stellar media like the Jetsons, Tron, and Star Wars.
It all made sense. Droids would be the norm, obviously. They'd attend school alongside our children, and to us they'd be coworkers, friends, fellow soccer mom/bots, etc.
Above our heads would be an elaborate transportation infrastructure of self-flying sleek, silver, LED light-adorned hover vehicles. All technology and data could be accessed either by a retinal scan device or by a thumbprint reader.
All pretty standard stuff, really.
While we do have some pretty cool shit, and medical advances are great and whatever, the future that we find ourselves in does not really line up with the FUTURE of our youth. And while I can forgive some of the current state of things for not matching The Jetsons, I've noticed some things we don't have that seem like they'd be really easy to create so...I don’t understand the hold up.
Things that are so simple that I can't believe we don't have them by now:
1. Shopping carts with seasonally appropriate tires.
This may be a solely Midwest problem, but the fact that when I go to Target mid-Minnesota winter, I am expected to somehow push a heavy cart with these ultra-thin, rusted little fair-weather bitch wheels through 7 inches of deep, wet snow is an atrocity. Gimme some chains for those things or swap them out for some clip-on skis so we can use our children as sled-dogs and mush our way to the car.
2. Smell-o-vision.
Don’t act like you haven’t thought about the absurdity that we have all this incredible technology, yet Stouffer’s hasn’t figured out a way to waft the delicious aromas of the frozen turkey dinner commercial into our nostrils. I’m shocked.
3. The ability to filter out unsavory things from our social media feeds.
There should be a way to put a mass block on triggering keywords of your choice like “Machine Gun Kelly”, “NFTs”, “Dogecoin”, and “The Duggars”. I want to be able to customize how I consume my trashy media, please and thank you.
I for sure thought that this far into ‘the future’ we’d have way cooler stuff and be living in a Blade Runner existence, but what really chaps my charlie is when I start to think about all the absolutely absurd things we STILL have in the year 2022. And I’m not talking about the big ‘no duh’ things like racism, sexism, shows like The Bachelor, and flat earth-ers, I’m talking about the other stuff… like these:
1. Baby on Board decals in car windows.
I guess they were originally invented to alert first responders that there was an infant on board in case of emergency, but have evolved to now be a guarantee that the person driving will act like an asshole on the road.
2. The color "nude."
I’d like to chat with the human who decided that particular hue was the color of all people with their clothes off and ask them just a couple questions about their world view. Cause wtf.
3. Phones STILL autocorrecting the word to ‘ducking’.
I will literally never need to say the word ‘ducking’ in a text. Ever. I will make the conscious choice to use words like crouching, hiding, avoiding, and evading if we can eliminate ducking entirely from the text vocabulary. Ducking A.