In the future, we'll try to live near a subway entrance. We have these new technologies we don't even have words for that are making us feel things we can't describe. Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.
The middle class is over it's not coming back. Separation anxiety will become our permanent state. In the future, you'll spend a lot of time feeling like a dog leashed to a pole outside a grocery store. And I'm not quite sure if that's a smart thing to be doing in 2010. No matter how bad things are, you have to be, like, oh, there's always a silver lining, or, oh, we can still be friends, or we can be happy. The elevator only goes down, and the bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop. In the future, it's going to get worse: no silver linings, no lemonade. And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness. DOUGLAS COUPLAND (Author): I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, make sure the person in the photograph is smiling. He calls it "A Pessimist's Guide to the Next 10 Years," and he shared some of those thoughts with us. And a few days ago, Coupland put out his predications for the coming decade. He's the man who coined the term Generation X, which was also the title of one of his books. Not to pile it on here, but novelist Douglas Coupland isn't too optimistic either.
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