Tag Archives: life

When Did the Future Become So Scary?

The TWA hotel at JFK airport in New York gives one an acute case of temporal dissonance. It’s a step backwards in time to the “Golden Age of Travel” – the 1960s. But even though you’re transported back 60 years, it seems like you’re looking into the future. The original space – the TWA Flight Center – was designed in 1962 by Eero Saarinen. This was a time when America was in love with the idea of the future. Science and technology were going to be our saving grace. The future was going to be a utopian place filled with flying jet cars, benign robots and gleaming, sexy white curves everywhere.  The TWA Flight Center was dedicated to that future.

It was part of our love affair with science and technology during the 60s. Corporate America was falling over itself to bring the space-age fueled future to life as soon as possible. Disney first envisioned the community of tomorrow that would become Epcot. Global Expos had pavilions dedicated to what the future would bring. There were four World Fairs over 12 years, from 1958 to 1970, each celebrating a bright, shiny white future. There wouldn’t be another for 22 years.

This fascination with the future was mirrored in our entertainment. Star Trek (pilot in 1964, series start in 1966) invited all of us to boldly go where no man had gone before, namely a future set roughly three centuries from then.   For those of us of a younger age, the Jetsons (original series from 1963 to 64) indoctrinated an entire generation into this religion of future worship. Yes, tomorrow would be wonderful – just you wait and see!

That was then – this is now. And now is a helluva lot different.

Almost no one – especially in the entertainment industry – is envisioning the future as anything else than an apocalyptic hell hole. We’ve done an about face and are grasping desperately for the past. The future went from being utopian to dystopian, seemingly in the blink of an eye. What happened?

It’s hard to nail down exactly when we went from eagerly awaiting the future to dreading it, but it appears to be sometime during the last two decades of the 20th Century. By the time the clock ticked over to the next millennium, our love affair was over. As Chuck Palahniuk, author of the 1999 novel Invisible Monsters, quipped, “When did the future go from being a promise to a threat?”

Our dread about the future might just be a fear of change. As the future we imagined in the 1960’s started playing out in real time, perhaps we realized our vision was a little too simplistic. The future came with unintended consequences, including massive societal shifts. It’s like we collectively told ourselves, “Once burned, twice shy.” Maybe it was the uncertainty of the future that scared the bejeezus out of us.

But it could also be how we got our information about the impact of science and technology on our lives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our fear of the future coincided with the decline of journalism. Sensationalism and endless punditry replaced real reporting just about the time we started this about face. When negative things happened, they were amplified. Fear was the natural result. We felt out of control and we keep telling ourselves that things never used to be this way.  

The sum total of all this was the spread of a recognized psychological affliction called Anticipatory Anxiety – the certainty that the future is going to bring bad things down upon us. This went from being a localized phenomenon (“my job interview tomorrow is not going to go well”) to a widespread angst (“the world is going to hell in a handbasket”). Call it Existential Anticipatory Anxiety.

Futurists are – by nature – optimists. They believe things well be better tomorrow than they are today. In the Sixties, we all leaned into the future. The opposite of this is something called Rosy Retrospection, and it often comes bundled with Anticipatory Anxiety. It is a known cognitive bias that comes with a selective memory of the past, tossing out the bad and keeping only the good parts of yesterday. It makes us yearn to return to the past, when everything was better.

That’s where we are today. It explains the worldwide swing to the right. MAGA is really a 4-letter encapsulation of Rosy Retrospection – Make America Great Again! Whether you believe that or not, it’s a message that is very much in sync with our current feelings about the future and the past.

As writer and right-leaning political commentator William F. Buckley said, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop!”

Keep Those Cousins Close!

Demographic trends tend to play out on the timelines of multiple generations. Declining birth rates, increased life spans and widespread lifestyle changes can all have a dramatic impact on not only what our families look like, but also how we connect with them. And because families are the nucleus of our world, changes in families mean fundamental changes in us: who we are, what we believe and how we connect with our world.

I have previously written about one such trend – a surplus of grandparents. The ratio of grandparents to grandchildren has never been higher than it is right now, thanks to increased life expectancy and a declining birth rate. It’s closing in on 1:1, meaning for every child, there is one unique grandparent. As a grandparent, I have to believe this is a good thing.

But another demographic trend is playing out and this may not be as positive for our family structure. While the grandparent market is booming, our supply of cousins is dwindling. And – as I’ll explain shortly – cousins are a good thing for us to have.

But first, a little demographic math. In the U.S. in 1960, the average number of children per household was 3.62. This was a spike thanks to the post WWII Baby Boom, but it’s relevant because this generation and the one before were the ones that determined the current crop of cousins for people of my age.

My parents were born in the 1930s. If both of them had 3 siblings, as was the norm, that would give me 6 aunts or uncles, all having children during the Baby Boom. And each of them would have 3 to 4 kids. So that would potentially supply 24 first cousins for me.

Now, let’s skip ahead a generation. Since 1970, the average number of children per household in the U.S. has hovered between 1.5 and 2. If I had been born in 1995, that would mean I only had 2 aunts or uncles, one from my mother’s side and one from my father’s. And if they each had 2 children, that would drop my first cousin quota down to 4. That’s 20 less first cousins in just one generation!

But what does this lack of first cousins mean in real terms? Cousins play an interesting sociological and psychological role in our development. Thanks to evolution, we all have something called “kinship altruism.”  In the simplest of terms, we are hardwired to help those with which we share some DNA. Those evolved bonds are strongest with those with whom we share the most DNA. There is a hierarchy of kinship – topped by our parents and siblings.

But just one rung down the ladder are our first cousins. And those first cousins can play a critical role in how we get along with the world as we grow up. As journalist Faith Hill said, writing about this in The Atlantic, “Cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook.”

As Hill said, cousins represent a unique middle ground. We have a lot in common with our cousins, but not too much. Our cousins can come from different upbringings, can span a wider range of ages than our siblings, can come from different socio-economic circumstances, can even live in different places. We may see them every day, or once every year or two. Yet, we are connected in an important way. Cousins play a critical role in helping us navigate relationships and learn to understand different perspectives. Having a lot of cousins is like having a big sandbox for our societal development.

If you overlay societal trends on this demographic trend towards fewer first cousins, the shift is even more noticeable. We are a lot more mobile now then our parents and grandparents were. Families used to generally live close to each other. Now they spread across the country. My wife, who is Italian, has almost 50 first cousins and almost all of them live in the same town. But that is rare. Most of us have a handful of cousins who we rarely see. We don’t have the advantage of growing up together. At a time when societal connection is more important than ever, I worry that this is one more instance of us losing the skills we need to get along with each other.

From my own experience, I have found that the relationship between my cousins is vital in negotiating the stewardship of our families as it’s handed off from our parent’s generation to our own. I personally have become closer to many cousins as – one by one – our parents are taken from us.  Through our cousins – we relive cherished memories and regain that common ground of shared experience and ancestry.