The Year 2035

* I got the idea for this entry from a similarly-themed spam email piece I received today, written by some midlife-crisis-stricken 30-something asshole reminiscing back to the 1960-1980s, when he was a kid, trying to convince everyone (his peers mostly, as the most sympathetic) that life was somehow better back than. It wasn't better, asshole! It was just different. You were a kid - being a kid is usually cool when you think back to it...

Hubert was born in the year 2000. By the time it became the year 2035, he was thirty-five years old. Becoming 35 for him personally came with a little side bonus - a mid-life crisis. He was sitting in his studio on the 200th floor of the Empire City Complex in the city of Jaegobah on the Seventh Moon of Jupiter one day, the wife was away, and the mid-life crisis sadness crushed him like a sumo elephant - a pigmei midget ant. Analog scenes from his childhood started flashing in front of his eyes like an antique slideshow, and it seemed that the memories made him happy again. He grabbed a pen and started to jot stuff down...stuff, he realized as he was jotting, he needed to send out to those like him, to make them feel better....:

"This piece is dedicated to the children of the period 2000-2015. You know who you are, you retro bastards:) If you were a child back then, when you look back now it will seem difficult to believe that you have survived till today...

Just for starters, we crazy kids from those days used to move ourselves around.... in CARS!... instead of teleport around! Yes, that's right! We actually had to undergo the physical effort of driving ourselves from one place to another - something that is lost on the current generation, grossly unable to appreciate the numerous benefits of this healthy exercise.

You better believe it, our food had saturated fats in it and we took our chances with that! (yes, this was waaaaay before the No Fats in Food Law of EUSA President Palin of 2017!). Our food was not checked for vitamins - imagine that!? Ha, in fact, we did not even suspect that vitamins caused AIDS until 2011!

OK, that's one positive development, but what about crime and terrorists? When confronted with terrorists, we could not use Kardjiev's Anti-Terrorist Atomic Vaporiser Keyring that we all use today, because it was not invented yet - we actually had to aim at prospective terrorists, possibly risk not hitting them, and when shot dead, they would not disappear but leave a body! And remember crime - another concept that no longer exists now after the invention of the Legal Compatibility Personal Morning Scan? Yes, we had crime back in the days, and it was so much fun to watch what it did on AXN each evening...

And what about social life!? Remember those crazy social almost-gatherings we had back via Facebook online - we used to chat to one another in person, maan, comment on our status and photos, not communicate via robot ambassadors, like today.... The human touch is gone, dude, and I miss it! Back in the days we didn't have the fancy Google Earth Pro Live Prohibited Edition that kids use now to monitor their girlfriends - our Google Earth information was static and outdated, even.... pixelated! And when we drove around, all we had to show us the way were the arhaic GPS systems, not the robodrivers that cars have today! Where's the fun in that!?

And what about love - whatever happened to meeting new people after a year of chatting on the Internet, the old-fashioned way? Nooo, who needs this much social exposure - much better to do it like kids today do it - undergo a calculation of genetic compatibility with a spouse at birth and have their spouse pre-selected.

And remember when we used to go nuts and mix more than one mineral water in the same glass!!? Oh, my, goooood! Now they would sentence you to two hours of Perrier treatment under the Bankia Convention for that!

And what about work? Work was fun back in the days! First of all we could choose it, instead of accepting whatever the Borissov Role Generator provides for us now at the age of 18. Also, our work week was not 20 hours weekly of non-stop labor under robot supervision like it is now, but was actully 12 hours of work under nobody's supervision (technically, the work week back then was 40 hours, but... come on, you remember...)

Video games? We used to know when video games started and ended, man, because the resolution was lower than real life! Now, nobody can tell which is life and which is video game - you can easily teleport yourself in the middle of some asshole's session of Medieval Amazing Race, together with the genetically-resurrected medieval knights and their spears and arrows...

Man, back in the days we used to live dangerously! We used to download pirate mp3s (why don't you try downloading an illegal mp10095 now, sucker, and see how fast the Interstellar CopyRightGuard teleports into your place!) We used to do stuff with our hands, like pick up documents and such and risk the muscle strain - now kids don't have to think about that - they have the Automatic Telepathy Mover Assistance glasses. And what about the injuries that we could incur? Injuries - what is that you say? Man, did you forget that there was such a thing as injuries, traumas and mental conditions before Doctor Gurdev invented the physical and mental InstaHeal cream for Bones, Skin and Brain?

We used to have role models, too. Brad Pitt...Valeri Bojinov...Izkusitelkata Zlatka...Azis...Those were people that were there right next to us - on TV! Now, all the winners for the game shows are genetically-bred from birth, and Steven Gerrard 43 is better than Steven Gerrard 42, naturally...

Another thing that really bugs me is communication. Back in the days, when you started to miss someone and wanted to see him, you ICQd him and all was well! Now - you hear the 'emotional distress' alarm, the house Doc robot comes and injects you with happy hormons and that's that. It was sooooo much easier to get in touch with someone back in the days - you sms him on one of his several phones, and if he has battery, he knows that you are looking for him and can get back to you as soon as he can log online. Or if all else fails, you can email him or if really necessary you can find him and talk to him for awhile? That human touch is certainly lost forever, definitely!

Imagine all the positive stress we had to go through - we did not know the outcome of sports games in advance, like kids have now with the Forward Time Advancement Continuum Device, so we had to worry, we were excited! Not only that, but we also used to play sports all the time, unlike now! Remember all those crazy nights spent in your LAN when the new FIFA came out!? That's gone now...

We did not have any information about anything either, besides the 160-channel digital TV, press and the Internet - imagine having to rely ONLY on those sources for information instead of the Omniinfo chip that babies now have implanted at birth, haha, ha... It would be so funny if it weren't so sad, actually, because back in the days we did not have it. But we were oblivious, maan, we were happy and nobody complained back in the days, imagine or not!

But what I miss most is the sex -ooooh the sex - we used to have so much sex with photos and videos of women on the net - now, all you can do is take the universal orgasm pills by Novartis - those that that asshole P. Petrov accidentally invented back in 2009 when he spilled two lab tubes together while trying to invent the "AC Milan Winning Formula" in after-work-hours.

Remember that Financial Crisis of 2008? That was so much more fun than the fixed 0.7% annual return all stocks currently make as per Intergalactic President Minov's "Simplifying Mathematics" Decree of 2024!

And remember the excitement that the recycling craze of our childhood generated? Remember how we used to worry about whether the polar ice caps would melt, man!? That was exciting! Now, there's no excitement at all after they all melted after it turned out that recycled garbage opened an interstellar vacuum that converted the Moon into a Mininova, and the polar ice caps together with Sashka Vaseva were melted, the Earth was flooded and humanity had to move to the Seventh Moon of Jupiter.

But there is one thing unchanged that I'm happy about, man! That Lili Ivanova still has a great voice!....."

Hubert put down the pen and ordered some coffee and an orgasm pill from the RoboServe 4.0 that was standing by. He went to the plazma window, looked at the projected cityscape, and a little piece of him actually thought: "man, u gotta admit this cityscape is actually cooler than the actual outside-scape back in the days the windows were made of see-through glass..."

My strongest proof of my prior claim, that a certain childhood is not better than another, but only different, is the fact that reading back through the above hypothetical scenarios actually made me think: man, some of these 2035 things would be better than now, others are worse, but worse in a way similar that a 35-year-old dude today would complain that things are worse compared to HIS childhood of the 1970s. Time passes, let's not fight that silly fight...

m-f