Why We'll Take Longer Baths in the Future

If you want to know your past, look at your present conditions. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions.
--Buddhist saying

Early in 2006, Joyce Vincent, a middle-aged woman, was discovered dead in her London flat. There was nothing remarkable about this, except for the fact that she'd been dead for more than two years and her television was still on. How could this happen? Where was everyone? The answer, of course, was that everyone was somewhere else. London, like most major cities, no longer has neighborhoods; it has collections of individuals leading increasingly isolated, selfish, and narcissistic lives. Neighbors keep to themselves, and people don't ask questions or volunteer information. In an age when everyone is increasingly connected to everyone else through the Internet, nobody really knows anyone any more.

We have lots of friends, but few of them dig deep to understand our hopes and fears. The general feeling is that you'll live longer if you keep yourself to yourself.

In Japan there is a social phenomenon called 'hikikomori'. The phrase roughly translates as 'withdrawal' and refers to boys who retreat into their bedrooms and rarely, if ever, come out. In one case a young man shut his bedroom door in his early twenties and played video games, watched TV, and slept for fourteen years. Food was supplied by his mother, who lived downstairs, virtually alone. The phenomenon is a particularly Japanese condition, although nobody can quite understand who or what is to blame. According to experts, there are somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million hikikomori in Japan, caused by everything from absent (always-working) fathers to over-protective mothers.

There are a number of simple explanations for problems like this, and most are wrong. Some people blame individualism; others point the finger at urbanization, technology, education, or even government. The reality is that it's all of these, but ultimately we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We, and only we, have let this happen. And if it's like this now, what will it be like in another fifty years?

Perhaps this is a strange way to start what is essentially a business book, but I think it's important to understand the bigger picture first.

I'm sitting in a budget hotel room at Miami International Airport. It's 10.30 p.m. My room is basic, but I have free access to the Internet -- either from my own computer or via a giant TV in my room. There is a coffee machine, complete with non-dairy creamer, and a small bar of hypoallergenic soap in the bathroom. Outside, on the other side of the freeway, a large neon sign reads 'Girls.' Unfortunately, inside the hotel, humans are rather absent. Indeed, while I can check up on the news in London through my TV, I can't order a sandwich because the restaurant closed thirty minutes ago. There is no room service either, presumably due to a focus on 'essential services.' The hotel is pretty full, but I don't expect to come into contact with anyone else. If you placed the 'Do not disturb' sign outside my door (and my credit rating was good enough) I could probably drop dead inside my room with the TV on and nobody would notice. My e-mail isn't working either because my e-mail provider has thoughtfully 'recently completed an upgrade of all services to enhance security and reliability.' Believe it or not, I can't access my e-mail because they have sent me a new password, but I can't access that because I don't have the password to open my e-mail. Brilliant.

If you want a vision of the future, this is a good one. I could be anywhere. In another ten or twenty years I will be able to access every film ever made in any language through the TV. The room will be personalized, too, in the sense that the hotel chain will know where I come from and what I like -- so Triple J will be playing on the radio as I enter my room, and decaf coffee and real milk will be in the fridge. The sandwich will still be an impossible request, unless I'm staying at one of the company's premium hotels, but I guess I'll be able to order one through the TV for twenty-four hour delivery. In twenty-five years time I will enter the hotel by placing my finger on a security panel by the entrance, and both the receptionist and the 'girls' will be holograms. I will gain access to my room with my world-phone or the chip inserted in my jaw and be able to customize the room myself to look and smell just like home -- but I still won't be able to get a sandwich from the restaurant at 10.30 p.m., and my e-mail still won't work.

Two big trends at the start of the twenty-first century are urbanization and the increase in the number of people living alone. In 2006, 25 percent of homes in the United Kingdom were single-person households. In Australia it was 17 percent, while in the United States single-person households have grown by 30 percent in thirty years, due to factors such as couples staying single for longer, easier divorces, and longer life spans, especially for women. We have also seen a significant reduction in the number of children born and a massive increase in the number of old people. In short, there is a lack of births and deaths, which means that the global population will go into decline around 2050, putting an end to fears of global overcrowding. You can see this already in statistics -- 22 percent of women in the UK say that that don't expect to have children.