Gratitude Friday 4 18 2025 – Through the Looking Glass of 1925

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” ― C.S. Lewis

I found this article a while back about what people thought 100 years ago about the world in this era. It was thought in that era that by now we would be immortal or at least live until 150. The Great War, which was seen as the war that would end all wars had recently ended. It was not yet called WWI. There had been no second great war. They could not imagine what was coming at them in respect to the Depression or WWII. It was the middle of the roaring twenties and life was good. It was a period of growth and optimism. Those sentiments are reflected in how they saw the future.

Some of these were widely off the mark, and others fairly accurate:

·       A substitute for sleep would be found. Its chief ingredient would probably be acid sodium phosphate.

·       Chemistry would be used to produce synthetic foods, making them chiefly out of nitrogen from the atmosphere.

·       People would use a pocket-sized apparatus for communications to see and hear each other without being in the same room.

·       There would be world peace, a common world currency and universal free trade.

·       The books of A.D. 2025 will probably be printed on nickel leaves, so light and thin that a single volume will contain 30,000 pages, and the pages will be more flexible and durable than paper.

·       The work of the house will be reduced to a negligible quantity by a hundred electrical devices, not a few of which are in use today, from opening the door or removing a meal to cleaning the boots, and the automatic cooking of a six-course dinner.

·       “In the world of manufacture, the change will be just as revolutionary. Where we have today a score of machines, one will then suffice. 

In some ways, even the things that were science fiction in my youth became science nonfiction in just a few decades. One thing that comes to mind was from the show Star Trek had a communicator, and of course we all now have devices that do more than it did. A wireless communication device and the internet were not things when the show was released.

When I was a kid, I read a lot of science fiction and a lot of it was quite hopeful about our future. Yet, I also books like the Population Bomb that expressed concern for population and consumption trends that it considered would outpace technological advancement and lead to profound problems for our future selves. While we vacillate between optimism and pessimism, it is true that we have never had an accurate view of the future.

I found this piece on what some think the world will look like in 2035 which was far less optimistic than what people 100 years ago envisioned for our lives now. It hedges the bet with an either-or scenario. We will live longer and travel among the stars or live in caves on our poisoned planet? These are very different trajectories. Which one will be our future? Probably, neither but both may end up having a ring of truth in them as this is often the case for such future projections.

I am not writing this piece to make any predictions of my own, but I will make a single observation. Our attitudes steer our behavior. If we are now more optimistic and willing to do things for the future, a better world, it is the one we will build. If we think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, why bother investing in the future? A chaos party becomes the priority the final hurrah that becomes somewhat self-fulfilling as a prophecy.

So, in many ways, our futures are like a car, it steers in the direction we look. This is one car we do not want to crash in a ditch. I am not here to tell you what that positive future looks like, each of us should examine our own hearts and figure what we want to work towards. Then work in our own lives towards that vision. That is how we make a future world positive. I am not sitting here with rose colored glasses ignoring the ugliness of our world, I say carry on anyway. Some days it can be hard not to throw up our hands and give up.

I for one am grateful that those who came before us did not do so, even when that may have been an appealing course of action. We can do the same and pay it forward. I am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

What are you grateful for today?