Where has the future gone?
Homo Sapiens hasn’t evolved to bend time into exquisite non-linearity like Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians (or the aliens in the movie Arrival), so what the hell am I talking about? I suspect you know quite well: the future was something we used to think about, even look forward to. It was a dimension that transcended the present. It was dynamic, it was superior, it was exciting.
If the question (and the eulogy it implies) is somehow still puzzling, consider that other science fiction writer William Gibson’s striking little reflection: “All through the 20th century we constantly saw the 21st century invoked…How often do you hear anyone invoke the 22nd-century? Even saying it is unfamiliar to us. We’ve come to not have a future.”
The “22nd century” is a phrase I’ve literally never heard spoken out loud. But I’m old enough to remember, just vaguely, being nudged to believe that the future held forth grand and dramatic changes, that time was dynamic and not static. Maybe it was just an overzealous scientist who worked for ANSTO and informed the young kids visiting Australia’s only nuclear reactor that – due to imminent breakthroughs in medical technology - we were either “the last generation to die, or the first to live forever.”
I believed this. Everything that has happened since has dashed my wide-eyed hopes. The defining issues of my generation, far from having anything to do with imminent immortality, are the literal sizzling of the planet and the extinction of its species, the limping, sputtering economy, the isolating, atomising, indifferent world of capitalism, job insecurity, surveillance, the uncharted dominion of AI, and the epidemic of depression and anxiety (probably connected to at least one of the other issues). The future is fatiguing to even think about.
We thought we’d cure cancer and be visiting the moon on the weekends, and instead we’re vexed about McDonalds ice cream machines malfunctioning. On the internet, memes abound in their multitudes making fun of our lost future. “It’s amazing to think what great and exciting things people will be doing with PCs in thirty years” muses an image of Bill Gates from 1989 in one meme. The bottom image shows us what people are doing with PCs in 2023: a picture of a leaf with Keanu Reeve’s face photoshopped in and the caption “Keanu Leaves.” This bad joke is the quintessence of Millennial humour, but the message is clear: old Boomers thought the future would be amazing, while their chronically online descendants have narrowed the horizons of progress to memetic evolution.
The meme bears out that the future is constructed by each generation. For Gibson’s generation (the Boomers), the future was a “cult” if not a “religion.” Gibson even coined the term “postalgia” to denote the utopian belief that the future would be perfect, putting the past and present in the shade. But for my own generation, the future, especially the distant future, is barely ever even contemplated. Greta Thunberg is the only person who comes to mind as a Gen Zer who has decidedly not abandoned the serious contemplation of the future. The fact that she also seems to dwell in a state of permanent eco-anxiety makes this observation telling.
In The Joyful Science, Nietzsche’s madman famously pranced around and proclaimed, “God is dead!” to a society unwilling to face the implications of what it had done. I think our society is ripe for the news of another, equally world-shattering death. This is the Death of the Future – the future as a forward vector. I take this to be almost uncontroversial to the point of platitudinous. If you doubt it, you can interview almost anyone at random and ask them if they agree with the statement “The future will be much better than the past.” You’ll get puzzled looks at the mere raising of this question.
Many are the forlorn eulogies to the future. Many are the blogs, books and articles trying to explain the huge prominence of nostalgia in 21st-century culture. Why are Millennials, recently overtaken by Gen-Zers, the most nostalgic of all, to the point that their shameless obsession with the 90s is literally a defining aspect of being Millennial? Why are we being sold the fashion of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s? Why are we watching endless remakes and reboots of older franchises? Why is pop music derivatively mining the past? Why is Paul McCartney selling so many tickets at a Sydney stadium? Why do retro shops pop up everywhere and attract teens wearing Pink Floyd t-shirts?
Explanations generally focus on the most obvious factors. Music critic Simon Reynolds wrote in his book Retromania that the introduction of broadband internet pushed nostalgia into overdrive, giving Millennials and Gen-Zers a colossal archive of past music, fashion, and essentially every form of culture. Anyone could now access the wealth of the past. The internet is a kind of peat bog that preserves artefacts that otherwise ought to just die. The late Gen Xer theorist Mark Fisher said of the age of Spotify and YouTube that “nothing is new because nothing is old.”
The other explanation that dutifully follows any discussion of our nostalgia epidemic is basically that nostalgia has become a sort of cultural painkiller. As we’ve noted, promises of a future filled with progress failed to materialise. Instead, Millennials got 9/11, and pretty much everything that followed 9/11 was a downer. Even I’ve been shamefully guilty of “missing” the good old days when the only civilisational worry seemed to be Islamic jihadism. So we immerse ourselves in the past, clutching onto all its artefacts for some strange form of reassurance.
Maybe we want to get deeper than this, however. I know I do. Why are there so many graphs showing the world has not gotten better economically or otherwise? Why is globalisation getting pounded left, right and centre? Why is the middle class so anxious about their future prosperity? Ultimately, my quest to uncover the roots of nostalgia led me to a minefield of literature called “collapsology.” It is, as you’d expect, a far from cheerful subject. I don’t necessarily commend this genre to those already anxious about the future.
The literature on collapse delivers some serious red-pilling. Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies, for example, gives a compelling explanation of collapse. In a nutshell, a civilisation’s complexity has an energy cost and, as it grows, is subject to diminishing returns. If we want to fund new innovation, it will cost more and more to get the same, or even declining, rates of innovation. Combine this with the costs of finding new energy sources, funding the retirement of the Boomers, the increasing cost of healthcare, replacing infrastructure, adapting to climate change and maintaining military power, all occurring in an age of net energy decline – it’s safe to say that economic growth is far from being assured in these conditions. Collapse – which Tainter defines as a rapid loss of socioeconomic complexity – seems a more likely outcome.
My engagement with collapsology gave me not only a renewed appreciation for what we have right now, but led me to grasp nostalgia as a psychological response to the end of growth. At least among young people, “growth” is almost a bad word; at any rate, it denotes something that must be prefixed with “green” or “sustainable.” If Tainter is right, sustainable growth is impossible. All we’re doing is sustaining a civilisation that demands increasing levels of energy input. The twilight of the era of cheap energy and endless growth is well and truly here. It’s an open secret, if a secret at all. Faith in industrial technology barely exists. The idea that AI or some ever fancier technology might save us probably lingers around in the dorm rooms of science students. But for the rest of us, seeing is believing.
Cultures in decline tend to be obsessed with strange things. The Russian elite on the brink of their demise in 1917 were preoccupied with the paranormal. I’m sure it’s rare that any society would baldly face up to its collapse, undertaking patient self-examination. Maybe this is too difficult. When your society is falling apart, you lose a very real sense of meaning. But in the past, when the Western world was in the throes of convulsion and chaos, it was very often religion that saved mankind from nihilism. In the brutal world of the late Roman Empire – while many aristocrats had grown extremely nostalgic for the golden years of Augustus – many thousands were moved by a powerful metaphysical narrative of cosmic redemption. God descended into the world and rescued a society tearing itself apart.
The narrative of Christianity itself bred nostalgia. Mankind was a vastly inferior lot to those biblical heroes who bestrode the world in ancient times. But countering this nostalgia, Christianity also provided hope in an eschatological drama awaiting humanity at the End of Time. Tears would be wiped away; knees would bow down to the Lord, and evil would be punished. The future was definitely where you wanted to be.
I mentioned Nietzsche’s madman before, famous for decreeing that God is dead. Well, when God died, we tried almost every other form of transcendence we could. Science, Reason, Progress, Utopia – grand narratives that, in their turn, fell apart as the modern age devoured itself. Progress was reduced to bigger shopping malls, the proliferation of new gadgets, and a scientific mastery over the biological world. It was a flimsy surrogate for God, but it worked for the Boomers. 20th-century Western culture had no backup surrogate for the demise of Progress.
We are not unique for being in a state of decline. But we are unique in our exhaustion of seemingly any form of transcendence.
The cultural malaise of which nostalgia is an expression has much to do with this lack of transcendence. It’s a form of nihilism that’s so profound it seems we’re condemned to become either totally trivial creatures or embrace some atavistic and nostalgic form of meaning. Well, the other option is acute despair of the Thunbergian variety.
Nostalgia is a symptom. But it’s not just a symptom of economic stagnation. It’s not just a symptom of industrial society’s decline. Too many analyses find in material realities – including politics, economics and technology – a complete explanation for the incredible nostalgia engulfing our culture. It’s obviously a truism that we’d be more cheerful about the future if wages were rising. But we’re not a merely material species. We care about so much more than economics. The recessions and pandemics that have driven Millennials and Gen Zers into the arms of nostalgia do not in any way guarantee such a forlorn response. A culture of beauty and spiritual depth – if it existed – could handle the vicissitudes of a material world.
The problem is that Western culture seems to be committed to little else besides profit, and empty values such as “tolerance” and “diversity,” which, while excellent aspirations, are hardly substitutes for the metaphysical narratives such as Christianity which made men and women in the past truly filled with awe, reverence and purpose. Our culture offers little to those who most need comfort. Perhaps, in their own enclaves, young people will end up mining their own latent creativity and produce their own, unique, honest and truly 21st century response to the ills of the world they were born into.
Joel Karanikas has been obsessed with culture and philosophy from the moment he learned about Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite pursuing the study of law, he tends to spend the spare time he has poring over the canon of Western philosophy and occasionally inflicting upon the world his own ideas about what’s wrong with our society.