Everyone besides Pharrell gets old eventually. It’s inevitable. Sure, if you’re a millennial or younger, that’s hard to imagine right now. But the process of you becoming old, aka uncool, is already in motion. There are kids in diapers at this very moment that will be cooler than you in as little as 15 years—nothing’s going to stop that. Nothing.
This is, no doubt, an unsettling thought. But indeed, the older we get, the more we hang onto things we picked up in our youth, and because only the new is cool, we become uncool. So when the time comes to start a family and have kids, what is absolutely a beautiful cycle of life also signals the death of our relevance in youth culture—the only culture that “matters” in a given moment.
So what’s going to happen to us currently hip youths the older and older we get? What’s the world going to be like when we’re the age people typically retire at today? We’ll get wrinkles, we’ll lose hair, we’ll start smelling odd, but what’s REALLY going to go down beyond that? By that I mean, what are our grandkids going to make fun of us for in the year 2070?
1. Not being able to code an app
Anyone who enters college at this point and doesn’t study computer science is basically deciding to be stupid in old age. I include myself in that category. I was an economics/English double major. Huge mistake. Sure, we can find our way around an iPhone pretty well, but our grandkids are going to grow up coding and learning Spanish in back to back classes at middle school. So when we have to ask them to come over and code a custom app that turns the oven off when we forget, they’ll roll their eyes and do it in the time it currently takes us to pull our grandmothers’ remote from behind a couch cushion. Shit.
2. Having trouble setting up Netflix on our retractable iPad FreshAir 27
We’ll probably stand too close to the insta-microwave when it’s on and fry the symbiotic identity chip everyone has in their left wrist by this point in time. Our grandkids will be visiting and we’ll try to casually insert that fact into conversation in between heaps of mashed potato food pills, which will cause them to throw their heads back in laughter but not fall over their chairs because it’s 2070 and there’s technology to prevent that from happening.
3. Mixing up our food pills with regular meds
Look, we aren’t sustainable enough now, so real food won’t exist anymore then. It’s all going to be 3D printed tablets packed incredibly dense with the nutrients we need and some biological trick that makes us think we’re chewing on and tasting a full salisbury steak meal—a real shocker when we think we’re treating our chronic arthritic pain. Our grandkids will tell their friends about it over their Cup Noodle pills at lunch.
4. Reading
Kids aren’t going to read in 2070. They probably won’t even read in 2015. By this point they’ll just upload information and skills directly into their brains like in The Matrix. So the sight of a real book will be acutely offensive.
5. Referencing The Matrix in reference to the recent technological singularity
“You know, you kids don’t realize this, but the whole “computers becoming smarter than their creators” idea was pretty much predicted in The Matrix. Great 1999 film starring Keanu Reeves. Very progressive for its time.”
“Who is Keanu Reeves and what’s film?”
6. Something called “Social Security”
LOL
7. The concept of gender
Girl? Boy? We’re all just going to be points on an endless spectrum. And that spectrum will change depending on who else is in the room at any given time and what position on that spectrum they own relative to us which is also affected by the position we have and everyone else’s relative position in existence and don’t try to say it was easier when there were two genders because that’s FUCKING SEXIST AND IGNORANT YOU OLD HACK.
8. Reminiscing about the NFL — or contact of any kind in sports
Sorry, Roger Goodell’s successor. Your legacy will be allowing the most profitable sports league in the world to collapse after making a public statement that the player paralyzed from the neck down in Super Bowl LXXVI needs to quit his “media parade.”
Our kids will think it’s funny when we snort in disgust every time an NBA player gets a flagrant 4 foul for staring down an opposing player standing at the free throw line.
9. Missing Earth
According to Michael Caine’s character in Interstellar (aka the Bible in 2070), “we weren’t meant to save the planet. We were meant to leave it.” Our grandkids will be the first generation born off the planet and think it’s really cute that we miss Earth. Sort of how we think it’s adorable that a movie ticket and popcorn cost a quarter in 1940.
10. Shitting our pants
Yeah this is still going to happen. In terrifically embarrassing fashion. Have fun.
