My future

   It's 2027. I live in a small, cheap apartment somewhere in western Washington. Thanks to tech the cost of living is going up everywhere, and thanks to global warming the temperatures keep going up. But for now, I can still live here, and I'll stay for as long as I can. 

    I don't see my family that often. Sometimes I send them Christmas gifts, but beyond that I don't talk to them at all. Many see estrangement as a tragedy, but for me it's a blessing. It means I don't have to rely on my relatives to take care of me. 

   There's talk of implementing universal basic income, but that hasn't happened yet. I'm glad the blog has become successful enough that I can live off of the money I make from it. Health insurance is a problem, but fortunately my mother still helps me with that. Since I rent, I don't have to worry about too many home expenses, although taking my laundry down the hall kind of sucks. 

    When I'm not writing for my blog, I'm practicing drawing or taking photo's. None of it is great, but it helps take my mind off of my fear of the future. The people who love my blog love it, but it's always going to be a bit niche. Sometimes I hear people saying things similar to what I write, but I don't know if it's because they heard it from someone who follows my blog, or if it's because I'm able to see what people are thinking before they think it. 

    I've self published some stuff on amazon, but now I'm working on getting my first traditionally published book out. It's a story I've wanted to tell for years. My followers keep begging for me to publish an anthology of poetry, but I want to wait until I've come up with a poem that's better than the one I wrote in the middle of 2020. It's not my most famous poem, but it's still the one I think is the best. I keep trying to write something better, but my brain can't seem to come up with anything good. 

   The world at large is trying to put the pandemic behind it, but if you ask me the scars are very visible. The country hasn't collapsed yet, but everyone is still worried that it could happen any day now. Companies still can't find workers, workers aren't able to find jobs, everything's still a mess. We've come to accept that this is our life now. We don't like it, but nobody can seem to come up with something better. Everyone agrees this state of things won't last forever, but all anyone can do is take it day by day and hope that when things fall apart, they'll have enough warning to run as fast as they can. 

    One piece of good news is that NFTs have fallen into obscurity, to the point where I forget they exist until I see video's of them. The bad news is they were replaced by Bit Books, which are sort of like NFTs except that they don't aim to turn everything into a stock market, they aim to turn everything into obscure tech that's impossible for anyone but a special few to understand. Every author seems to have had their work stolen to turn into these things, to the point where congress is now looking into creating a law to ban them. I for one am all for it, but I don't think it'll pass. 

    Sometimes I look back at the stuff I wrote during the pandemic and think about all the people who insisted we would go back to normal. In some ways we did, in some ways we didn't. People are going back to concerts and bars, many went back to the office, and school has gone back to being what it mostly was before the pandemic. But snow days are now mostly a thing of the past. More and more people are getting to work from home. Students in schools all across the country are doing most of their work on computers. 

   What I find most striking is how many people seem to have given up on getting the things they were fighting for not that long ago. People still push, but most seem to have forgotten how, not that long ago, we saw the system fail. I do hope that someday, we'll live in a true land of dreams instead of a land of lies. For now, all I can do is take life one day at a time.