Kimberly Steele

First, allow me to dispel a few rumors about my time. We don’t have flying cars or jet packs, but we are not exactly living in mud huts either. The Revolution never came, though many people wasted their lives waiting for it. Politicians still exist and they are as corrupt and useless as ever. There is still a mainstream media, but the fantasies the average human being suffering total and complete brainwashing from it from cradle to grave were highly exaggerated. 

The one thing that can be said is that we don’t have the same kind of luxuries you guys used to take for granted. For instance, food. We get avocados and oranges once a year at the grocery store, and that grocery store has no competition within a five mile area because most people walk or bike to it. There’s a bus that makes the rounds once a week to the market area of town, but if you want to be on it, you have to get up early. The kids around here do not know what a pistachio or an almond tastes like, but they are extremely familiar with sunflower seeds and peanut butter. Speaking of peanut butter, finding a kid who is allergic to peanut butter is like spotting a narwhal on an ocean voyage — extremely rare. Nobody vaccinates anymore, and when people finally stopped getting themselves and their kids jabbed, rates of allergies and autism mysteriously hit rock bottom. I’m not sure why it took so long for average people to realize that good hygiene and nutrition were actually responsible for the defeat of various infectious diseases. I’m not surprised however, because people of your era knew next to nothing about the energy body or the etheric level of existence. Nowadays, it is taught in medical school.

Now, don’t go thinking we live in some kind of health utopia. People die younger than they did in your era. When a child gets cancer, we make them as comfortable as possible, but we do not have the resources or the sadistic drive to put him or her through a rat maze of treatments. When anyone past the age of 70 gets cancer or has a heart attack, we don’t intervene except for giving him or her the “good” drugs and practical and spiritual end of life guidance. This probably seems cruel to you. To us, your way of extending quantity of years without quality was not only cruel, it was moronic, wasteful, and insane. 

From our purview, you guys subsisted as much as you lived. The saddest of our elderly are the gaming and porn addicts (these two things often went hand in hand). Many of these relics of your era are women — women still tend to live longer than men. They were once girls who were addicted to dopamine by the tender age of three. Enabled by indulgent parents, these women have never worked or married. They have remained adolescents well after menopause. The internet gradually became so expensive, only the rich could afford the kind of wi-fi you have at Starbucks (I remember those!) for free. Most people of your era thought server farms were forever, not having any clue of how much those places cost or the kind of subsidies and energetic inputs it takes just to cool them. Anyway, most of these women’s parents died right around the time internet prices got jacked, and there they were with no income, no skills, and the mentality of a spoiled 12 year old in a world that eats those sorts of people alive. 

Anyone who had an adult autistic brother, sister, or cousin had already taken them in as the last of the Millennials died off. The nursing home system was already broken in your era by private equity — look into it. There are entire outdoor cities of homeless, autistic adults living on the streets, and their unit of currency is often a working wi-fi connection to what little is left of the internet. There are gaming dens run by sleaze bags where old people go to whittle away their remaining time on vintage games like World of Warcraft and Nomrial Legends on a local intranet while pretending it is still 2010. 

The old porn and video game addicts usually live in group homes, which are warehouses of death and suffering unlike anything you ever imagined. Most criminals vastly prefer jail and prison to those places; they’re abattoirs and everyone knows if you go in, you never come back. There is not much you can do with an elderly person who lacks the skills to work the most menial of retail positions, and the service industry ain’t what it used to be, so there aren’t many retail jobs outside the town market.

For those of you who think we are some kind of idiocracy because of the pathetic state of education in the world you left to us, actually, you guys are the idiots and we don’t look upon the educators of your era too kindly. Most of you indefinitely kicked the can of not knowing how to do anything down the road. That’s why you all went to college and grad school long after it was extremely apparent that all that did was to suck you into a river of debt. Your incompetence, however, was arguably worse than the debt you left. We have had to resurrect almost every old skill you forgot about, and we had to do it in weird ways. Some of us preserved old web sites and web pages on old computers. The old internet had a wealth of information on how to do stuff on it. It wasn’t all porn and games. Some of us collected books and started libraries. These libraries became a lifeline for those who actually had the motivation to learn useable skills. Most of us had no choice but to discard both health insurance and allopathic medicine in general because we could not afford to be perpetually sick like you guys.

You guys spend an awful lot of time feeling sorry for yourselves and then trying to medicate your sorrows away with things that cost a ton of money and time. Gratitude does not seem to have been a thing in your era, and the ones who practiced it were fringe outliers. You guys used to fly around the world even if you did not need to do it, costing both your society and the Earth itself in ways you never bothered to count. People who used to travel overseas to visit with family do not do that anymore, and the few elites that do it are heavily criticized and do it via ship. There are still luxury ocean liners, but they always have a dual purpose as cargo ships that deliver food and supplies wherever they stop. Everything has dual or triple purpose now. That is our modernity. We don’t just do one thing. Also, we don’t go to college for what we can learn at home. Most people are farmers now, whether it is only the front yard or a full, working agricultural hub. You romanticize farming as if it was always easy and fun. There are beautiful farms, sure, but it is not as bucolic as you make it. There are thin years when we have to depend on five year old canned tomatoes in order to avoid scurvy. That said, the food we eat is far better than yours ever was, despite you guys having much more complexity and variety. My neighbor grows goji berries. Another makes medicines. Not useless, addictive medicines, actual tinctures that work and teas comfort and cure colds. We may not have pistachios and chocolate, but we have regular mealtimes and time with family to enjoy our meals. There is no such thing as out of season produce, and that is why our food tastes so good. Everyone either knows how to cook or knows someone who can, and we never have to worry about bugs or spit in our food. Sugar costs a lot of money so there are understandably not so many addicted to it outside of the old and the rich. Sugar caused a lot of your health problems by the way, and so did your addiction to caffeine and ways of getting rid of excess corn, a.k.a. "cheap" meat. 

People of your era are increasingly hated, and Gen Z and Alpha are coming into their own where being hated is concerned because they were the last generations able to get away with the materialist excesses that bankrupted the people being born right now long before they were itches in their Daddie’s pants. Your spiritual leaders are especially mocked, such as the succession of Dalai Lamas. That’s no longer a thing.  Spiritual leaders are not taken seriously if they have ever lived in a McMansion. Boy, you guys were gullible. Speaking of crappy leaders, most European monarchies were dissolved in the wake of assorted conspiracy theories becoming conspiracy facts. 

We have more local government now, and when we get truly tired of a leader whom we feel has betrayed us, he or she goes to the public gallows. There is thing called accountability that is more in fashion than it was in your time. We also don’t tolerate child molesters. They are either hung or taken to the same slaughterhouse as cows and pigs and we kill them via captive bolt. We don’t waste good bullets on those pathetic creatures. 

Housing became cheap a couple of decades ago. The system that was keeping house prices inflated finally collapsed enough for the average couple to start a homestead in the country or the emptied-out cities and suburbs without much more than a wing and a prayer. There was a tiny population surge but not much. Most people’s reproduction has been compromised by birth control chemicals in the water from women who took the Pill or its equivalents, chem trails, MRNA vaccination, low sperm count and isolation because of porn usage, and environmental factors such as plastic particles in everything. The biggest challenge is keeping your house roughly weatherproofed and standing, not affording it. We salvage everything we can from the junk you guys left behind. We scrap your old office buildings for metal and copper. We use cubicle walls as insulation. I have even seen those stupid desk organizer things you used to have in boatloads made into herb gardens. 

I could go on if I didn’t have so much work to do. I am a writer: we still have those. I did not go to college for it, in fact like most, I dropped out of school at age 12. My writing does not save me from doing dishes, laundry, or growing and preserving food like everyone else. All in all, I would say that I have a good life, and others do as well. People work themselves to death just as they did in your era, but they are far more likely to do it under the golden sun surrounded by people they love, not locked away alone in some godforsaken hospital.

Anyways, I’m off to do my chores.