According to recent data from the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of American adults say that if they could choose when to live, they would live sometime in the past. Another 40 percent have the good luck to be born exactly when they want to live. And only 14 percent would choose to live in the future.
These are remarkable and sobering numbers. This is the wealthiest society in the history of the world, and technological change has been plunging forward at remarkable speeds. But so few of us are optimistic about what’s coming that Americans are three times more likely to wish they lived in the past than the future.
There was a time when the future certainly seemed to hold more appeal. The animated sitcom the Jetsons, which came out in 1962 (and was set in 2062), featured a working class that had robot servants and a flying car. Breadwinner George Jetson worked at a factory, and he wasn’t any sort of manager. But his job seemed to entirely consist of pushing buttons, and his workload was light enough that he complained when his boss Mr Spacely made him work for three hours a day.
The Jetsons was the lightest of light entertainment and no one’s idea of a serious prediction about the future. (The family also had a talking dog.) Even so, as a full-color daydream about the distant future, it was revealing. In the early 1960s, the “middle class” had recently and dramatically expanded. The postwar economic boom felt like it could be a new permanent feature of reality. And a whole raft of modern conveniences were hitting the market just as many more people could afford them. Against this background, it felt plausible that future technological progress would play out in a way that would make life better for everyone.
It makes all too much sense that the same confidence is far less widespread as 2025 turns into 2026. The sense that each new generation will have better lives than the last has been, at the very least, complicated by the “disruption” of jobs…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
