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What will people think of us in a hundred years’ time? Supposing they can still access the billions of gigabytes worth of pouting teenage selfies and cat videos, will they view our era favourably?
Look beyond the generation of posed photographs, enhanced with editing software and special effects, and see the news events across the world. School shootings, suicide bombers, terrorist attacks, and military coups, all recorded in High Definition for posterity. See the health statistics of each nation published in handy bar charts and percentages, reflecting our challenges with junk food diets and addiction. Watch the debates on environmental trends leading us ever closer to catastrophe. These are all propagated and controlled by human emotion; greed, spite, competition, glory, thirst for power, envy, to name but a few. These are the negative patterns we are reinforcing for the next generation to come.
Despite what the movies would have us believe, people rarely change. Take a group of friends, a family or a collection of workmates in any era, and you’ll find the same loves, laughs, and tragedies occurring throughout evolving situations. Our emotions are no less intense now than in the 1920s or the 1820s.
Technology comes and goes and we adapt to changing circumstances, but we remain true to ourselves. Those who were selfish and…