Why We'll Take Longer Baths in the Future

New theories of time and space

There will also be tensions generated by these differences. People living in metropolitan areas will tend to push for the rapid deployment of innovations, while older, more conservative rural and semi-rural populations will generally seek to limit them. It will also be a battle between the technology haves and the new Luddites (the technology have-nots and want-nots). The first tribe will tend to have money, but they will suffer from time famine and space anxiety because they won't have either of these. The second tribe, conversely, will tend to have time and space but little or no income, relatively speaking, because this will be tied up in real estate or spent on healthcare costs. So, for example, young people will enjoy very high salaries, but they will be unable to afford the overall standard of living enjoyed by their parents and grandparents because of long work hours, the high cost of real estate, and the lack of private space. What was 'free' to their forebears (fresh air, public parks, public beaches, libraries, roads, etc) will all cost money.

Overall, people will cope -- just -- with the avalanche of change, uncertainty, and anxiety, but many of them will seek refuge in the past. They will escape the present through various nostalgic pursuits, although their love of the new will sit alongside a fondness for the past.

They will mentally return to the eras they grew up in, which they will perceive (often incorrectly) as being safer, warmer, and more certain than the present or the future. They will covert old cars, old clothes, old music, and even old technology. Again, this is already happening. Just look at the popularity of old arcade video games (Pong), old car designs (the 'new' VW Beetle), old running shoes, and 'old' food (recipes). Indeed, as people and products become more perfect (humans through surgery and gene modification, products through quality control and innovation), we will seek out imperfect people and products.

Patina will be big in the future. Women with facial lines will be highly desirable, while new hydrogen-powered cars will be available with used-looking paintwork and worn leather seats as optional extras. Another example is pornography. The fastest-growing segment of the pornography industry worldwide is 'real' or 'amateur' pornography using real people rather than airbrushed or surgically enhanced 'models'. In other words porn like it used to be. Nostalgic pornography for the over-seventies crowd? That will be coming along shortly, too.

We will also, where possible, shut the outside world away completely by locking our front doors and turning our homes into either high-security compounds or -- more likely -- miniature holiday resorts. An interesting fact I came across recently is that the ratio of gated communities to trailer parks in the US is 1:1. People will withdraw into themselves because they will feel impotent in the face of change and believe their lives lack meaning. This will be a problem because if the majority of people withdraw and take refuge inside their homes and inside individual obsessions, governments (and companies) will have carte blanche to behave exactly as they like. To misquote Woody Allen, all that future dictators will need to be successful is for nobody else to show up. The opposite of good isn't evil -- it's indifference.

Meet mini-me

For the technically minded, doorbells will disappear in favor of proximity indicators. We will constantly know where our friends and family are thanks to the descendents of services like Friendfinder, and we will be able to screen out the unknown and the unfamiliar. This will undoubtedly increase our safety, but it will remove the element of surprise from our lives. .

Amazon's recommendation software already removes chance encounters with totally unrelated books. Other types of software could do the same with people in the future. This is bad news for society and especially bad news for new ideas, which thrive on social interaction, cross-fertilization, and serendipity. We will therefore meet more people like ourselves in the future and be protected from people and ideas that are strange or unfamiliar. This is hardly a recipe for global harmony and understanding.

We will also be taking longer baths in the future as an antidote to modern stress, anxiety, and change. However, we will be contradictory. Many of us will embrace natural-looking materials and bath scents rather than the real thing because we will have so little experience of the real thing. Research conducted by the US Taste Research Foundation recently found that people generally prefer artificial smells to the real thing, partly because they are nostalgic about fake smells from their childhood. In the future, fake will thus become more real than real. Any (fake) experience we want will also be available via smart drugs, nanomedicine, and screenbased products, making the real strange and unfamiliar to most people.