Dear 1999,
Hi. It’s the future.
You’re not going to believe any of this.
First, good news: the world did not end at Y2K. Your VCR still blinks 12:00 for no reason, but civilization survived. You can relax now. Well, maybe not exactly “relax”…
The bad news: remember how you thought the internet was mostly for dial-up noises, AOL chat rooms, and downloading one LimeWire song per hour?
Well it becomes the place where all of humanity lives, argues, shops, dates, works, panics, and fights with strangers named FreedomEagle420.
We carry these tiny glowing rectangles everywhere. They contain every song, every movie, every book, every newspaper, every conspiracy theory, and every opinion ever formed by someone in a comment section.
We call them phones. They do not make us calmer.
They are also our cameras and in the future people take 40 photos of their lunch before eating it and then ask the internet if the lighting is emotionally supportive.
Also, we voluntarily install microphones in our homes and cheerfully say things like, “Play rain sounds.” Yes. We did this willingly.
You think “working from home” means calling in sick. Ha, in the future millions work from home in sweatpants while staring into video meetings where everyone nods thoughtfully and secretly checks email. “You’re on mute” becomes the catchphrase of an entire generation. This was mostly born from a global pandemic. Yep, that’s right — you have an actual global pandemic in your future! You will hoard toilet paper, clap out your windows at 7pm, and when you do leave the house you will stand six feet apart on little floor stickers like you’re in a dystopian board game. The absolute weirdest thing though is that the same people who picket at abortion clinics will begin chanting “my body my choice” when asked to wear a mask so they don’t kill grandma. Speaking of a woman’s right to choose, the choices are looking a little limited these days. Ugh.
Ok moving on, so you’re currently worried Napster will destroy the music industry. That turns out to be adorable. Streaming destroys everything instead. Blockbuster disappears. Cable TV fades. Newspapers struggle. But somehow Friends survives forever.
Everyone is constantly arguing. No one is reading past headlines. Every day feels like breaking news even when nothing actually changed.
Speaking of breaking news, remember how scandals used to feel rare and shocking? They’re not so rare and nothing feels all that shocking.
In the future, a global sex-trafficking case involving billionaires, royalty, celebrities, private islands, sealed documents, and decades of unanswered questions does become one of the biggest stories in the world. So all those details and one person gets convicted while the main guy kills himself during the few minutes the camera on his cell cut out. 🙄
Then the news cycle moves on.
So politics becomes… well, hard to explain.
First, the country did elect its first Black president. He’s young, charismatic, calm, and cool in a way presidents rarely are. People talk about hope. Healthcare expands. Same-sex marriage becomes legal nationwide. There’s talk of progress, social change, and maybe the country bending toward something better. He does have his scandals though —one time he wears a brown suit.
Then his eight years end.
And the next presidential election is between:
The wife of a former president who was famously outed for getting blowjobs in the Oval Office from a White House intern…
and
A reality television host and businessman with multiple bankruptcies who was recorded on a hot mic bragging crudely about sexually assaulting women.
He wins.
The next four years feel like living inside a nonstop breaking-news banner. Cabinet firings. Tweets at all hours. Constant investigations. Daily outrage. Exhaustion becomes a shared national hobby, but the SNL skits are gold.
Then he loses the next election — and insists he didn’t. Claims the election was stolen. Millions believe him. On January 6th, a crowd storms the U.S. Capitol violently trying to stop the certification of the election. The entire world watches it happen live. The election does get certified and a bunch of these Capital stormers go to jail.
Then comes four years of a calmer, older, deeply traditional president. Less chaos. Less noise. A whole lotta gridlock.
And then the reality-show president runs and wins again. First order of business is to pardon those people who stormed the capitol. No really – he did!
Which now let’s circle back to those sealed documents, those unanswered questions, and the sprawling Epstein case that never quite stops resurfacing — where oh yeah, the president’s name appears oh like a gazillion times. Now these allegations and reporting tied to Epstein’s social circle are lawsuits he was never charged in, though he was found guilty of 34 other felony counts. Yes- for real.
At this point the whole timeline starts to feel less like history and more like a writers’ room that ran out of ideas and decided to try everything at once.
Enter the ICE era – immigration agents, wearing masks and carrying guns pulling people out of cars and homes without warrants regardless of citizenship and throwing men, women, and children into detention centers. Yes, it does sound familiar. Keep reading those history books while you can 1999, it seems they may not always be available in the future.
Citizens watch videos of people being beaten, shot, and murdered in the street on the same phones they use to order groceries. Then the president and his people tell you that you didn’t see what you saw and some of your family and friends get mad at you for saying what you saw instead of saying you saw what you didn’t see that you were told you saw.
Mass shootings become so common that they stop being shocking and start being categorized.
“School shooting.”
“Mall shooting.”
“Parade shooting.”
“Concert shooting.”
The news moves on before the funerals are finished.
Meanwhile the planet keeps getting hotter. Scientists repeat the same warnings for decades. The evidence piles up. The weather grows stranger. The storms grow stronger. The fires grow bigger. The oceans keep rising. And instead of strengthening the agreements designed to protect the planet’s air, water, forests, and future — the President of the United States begins dismantling them. Withdraws from global climate agreements. Rolls back environmental protections. Expands drilling. Weakens safeguards meant to protect natural resources that took millions of years to form. And then, during a historic cold snap — weather, not climate — he posts on social media:
“Whatever happened to global warming?”
As if global warming meant every day would feel like summer. As if climate meant weather. As if the long-term warming of the planet — the oceans absorbing heat, the ice melting, the atmosphere trapping more energy year after year — could be disproved by a cold morning.
Anyway. That’s our guy.
So go ahead and party like it’s 1999.
Just… one more thing. Sadly Prince is gone now, and the city where he lived — Minneapolis — becomes one of the epicenters of the protests, the grief, the anger, and the streets filled with people demanding change.
Turns out Prince always knew where the revolution would be.
Yours truly,
2026 (1 month in)
Seahorses and Sunflowers 🌻 