The absurd things we do now

25 Aug 2022

Louis C.K. has this bit about how things that people did “back in the day” would now seem ridiculous in retrospect, like dialling a telephone or getting cash from a bank teller. At the time, no one would’ve given a second thought to the things he described, but with new technologies, we inevitably take the easier, faster, better ways of doing things for granted over time and we laugh at how dumb the “old ways” were.

This got me thinking—What are the things we accept as just part of daily life in 2022 that we’ll find archaic, borderline absurd, in the future? In other words, what would make for good “remember when…” observational comedy material years or decades from now?

After a brief brainstorm, here’s my submission for the “absurd things we do now”:¹

1. Driving, obviously!
   • I think we’ll find it foolish that we trusted everyone who passed a driving test one time when they’re 16 will somehow stay responsible, careful, and sane enough to drive for the rest of their lives.
   • Or even that, as long as a human is driving, something as small as sun glare could lead to terrible accidents.
2. The “Standard American Diet” (SAD).
   • Once we know better, we’ll be shocked that we used to condition ourselves from childhood to crave highly-processed, carb-heavy foods.
   • More broadly, I think there will be less of a direct tradeoff between cost, convenience, taste, and nutrition when it comes to the things we eat. E.g. Fast food is convenient and cheap, but unhealthy.
3. Continuing on the topic of food,² just how wasteful we are with it.
   • Both in the sense of raising a whole animal when we’ll only eat select parts of it and shipping drinks in bottles / cans across large distances despite their content being 95%+ water.³
4. Not knowing which diseases we have until it’s too late.
   • It seems to me that we still treat our #1 asset—our health—rather unsystematically. We should expect continuous health monitoring for our brains & bodies, the same way we do with software.
5. Having corners of the world that are so remote (i.e. no data, access to internet) that one can be completely “offline”.
6. Language barrier.
   • With real time & always-on interpretation, I imagine the idea of not understanding someone due to a language barrier will become a thing of the past.
7. Emails, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations.
   • OK, this one might be more of a personal wish list item. Specifically, just how creating or manipulating these makes up most of a white collar worker’s job and still responsible for so much global GDP. They’re today’s fax machines.
8. “Occupation” being a single-select option vs. multi-select.
   • Early version of this looks like freelance & gig work, but I think tying your professional identity to one employer would seem strange going forward.
   • What replaces the employer-employee relationship? I’m not sure, but it could look more like time-bound projects (a la heist movies) or more people becoming a company of one.
9. Our fallible memories.
   • Before search engines, you couldn’t quickly look up most factual information (e.g. “In what year was the storming of the Bastille?”). Today, it’s still hard to query non-textual information sources (e.g. a discussion in a podcast or something that happened in a video).
   • It’ll be strange to us that so many of the things we saw, heard, experienced, etc. we could neither perfectly recall nor easily look up afterwards.⁴
10. By default, assuming a video is “real” (i.e. a camera filming something IRL).
    • With the proliferation of AI video / audio tools (both better tech & reduction in cost), so much of the content we consume will be AI-generated that we’ll need move to a new baseline of “it’s deepfaked until proven authentic.” We’re already starting to see examples of this happening.

OK, I’ll stop there. What did I miss? What else about how we live today will we one day find absurd?