What will historians say about the current year 10 years hence? I’ve tried my hand at a first draft.
Four years following the COVID-19 lockdowns, 2024 was the strangest of all, with whole populations trying to behave as if life was normal, spending far more than they could afford simply because no one wanted to accept the dramatic change, much less that it was a permanent one.
Credit card debt soared just as it was least affordable to hold, even as news of government spending trillions upon trillions of dollars became something of a white noise of public life. The United States was fully at war with Russia but through surreptitious means: It paid its own military contractors to conduct the war and therefore never had to declare it.
Billions of dollars flowed to favored industrial interests that benefited from foreign conflict and away from the middle class and poor. Public support for Ukraine was not real but only a class flex: It indicated that you are on the smart side, not the dumb side, in a society ever more torn by strange, seemingly unpredictable, and mostly symbolic divisions.
It was the last days of seeming prosperity. The spoils were being divided.
The economy did not look utterly terrible from the numbers alone, but that was because of data manipulation from the top. This allowed most people to pretend that life could become normal again if they just ignored obvious contrary signs and behaved as they did in the past, whatever that could mean based on what people remembered of the before times.
The lockdowns had already crushed small businesses, local theaters, and the hospitality industry overall. The trillions in payoffs were long gone, their value eaten by the inflation that began not even a year later. Since then, they struggled to regain markets and customer loyalty against terrible odds.
By mid-year, the ominous signs were everywhere. No more Starbucks, Wendy’s, and Chipotle. Even McDonald’s was a luxury, but service there was mostly touchless, a pandemic-era neologism that survived as wage floors rose ever higher and made hiring and keeping employees instead of robots ever more difficult.
Store brands and Mr. Coffee at home gradually became the norm, and only the well-to-do continued the routines of pricey hotel brunches, weekend stays at resorts, pop concerts, and annual trips to Florida. Museums and libraries struggled to survive with fewer than half the visitors than were typical in the before times.
Eventually, the luxuries, too, became less frequent, as the signs of prosperity widely shared only a few years earlier became available only to those who won in the years of the Great Reset.
Moms and dads remembered how their parents took them for ice cream on a Sunday afternoon and tried to do the same for their own kids. But when the bill arrived, they had to suppress the sense of shock, as well as the deep feeling that this ritual could not last another generation.
Every aspect of life vaguely felt like a financial scam. A $60 ticket to the theater tacked on a surcharge of $8 for no particular reason. The hamburgers kept shrinking because customers would not pay full price for the large ones. Hospitality depended on drunk customers to order drink after drink without paying attention as inebriated brains are far less price conscious.
No matter where you went or what you did, there was someone or something demanding one’s credit card to be hit with some seemingly arbitrary charge. There was a disconnect between what one consumed and the amount spent, as if handing over the prized piece of plastic was a license to take as much as possible given the opportunity.
Service was worse everywhere. It was an unusual flight that departed and arrived on time. Amenities in every sector turned into opportunities for new charges. Bills became too complicated to understand as every company learned to hide new charges in financial statements that no one read. The whole goal of professional life became to collect as much as possible from others, like a polite pillaging that had the form but not the substance of a market transaction.
The old system of being fair and kind in order to earn repeat business in the long term came to an end. This was because the long term no longer mattered. Most people did not care about it or tried not to.
The most immediate priority became personal safety. In areas that were once safe and where stealing was unknown, crime became the norm. What was shocking at first became an expectation, and people adjusted their behavior accordingly. Businesses in large cities with street-level storefronts closed.
Major sections of cities were overtaken with tents, trash fires, and wandering addicts, creating apocalyptic scenes that only the brave dared film. Half of smaller businesses could no longer pay the rent on time.
Large companies failed to restore old work patterns following lockdowns and so renegotiated leases to contract for much less office space. Tall buildings, once monuments to the greatness of American life, began to default, triggering the first signs of what would become a full banking crisis.
It was safer at home financially and personally.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for the bigger disaster: a food shortage, an outage of the electrical grid, a financial meltdown, a giant political crackdown, something. Apocalyptic scenarios, too, became commodified as political ideologies and then class indicators. You could tell who was who based on whether they believed climate change or iatrogenic depopulation was a greater threat.
The apocalypse could be anything, but it was obvious to all that the current system could not last. The candle was burning from both ends, financially and otherwise. The problem was that no one knew for sure how long it would burn.
The masses of people gradually settled into an angry and powerless silence, sharing their real views only with trusted friends and family, as real household income experienced hit after hit, with no seeming means of escape. Not even the political systems that people once believed were the key to reining in the powerful functioned properly. Everything started to feel broken: economics, politics, culture, education, and even manufacturing.
This was an election year in the United States, and people tried to whoop up the usual excitement about the candidates. But there was a growing sense that the results might not matter at all. After all, three years had gone by with an aged president who was clearly not in charge and whose only life skill was reading the notes someone else put in front of him. The previous president, now running for a second term, was tangled in legal struggles that everyone, including the persecutors, knew were politically motivated.
The signs of breakage were everywhere, from airplanes to websites to appliances, and ever less anomalous. In time, and given the trauma of the pandemic years, memories of good times past began to fade. What was once called high civilization gradually evolved into a gray and dull routine of surviving one more day, come what may.
Everyone knew it. But few spoke about it, simply because there was nothing to be gained by doing so. That was because nothing anyone could do would change the outcome in any case. As a result, life became drudgery without planning, with everyone accepting his lot: bourgeois or broken, protected or vulnerable, a winner or a loser based on which side of the class divide one resided.
Certain services were available to everyone, such as streaming films. These were movies and shows viewed on electronic devices that revealed a fictional world viewers would never experience but were intended as a substitute for the real thing.
Parents panicked when they became aware of the social media addiction that their children developed during lockdowns. There was popular support for the banning of apps (the most famous of which was called TikTok, as if to invoke a clock of doom), but this only provided the necessary pretext for the real goal: complete government control of the internet.
The technologies in use for connecting to others only a few years earlier became fully owned by the regime. The internet, which only a decade earlier had been celebrated as a medium for free speech, became the opposite. But people still spoke of “Googling” something as if it would reveal some consensus truth. It had not yet dawned on people that the system no longer worked for them but against them.
So it was with all systems. The ranks of the dissidents grew, but therefore, so did the political targets. Americans for the first time in many generations had to deal with a different problem. What does one do when friends and neighbors run foul of the ruling masters? Defend them or stay quiet? The answer depended on just how bad the oppression had become. The trouble was that no one knew for sure.
Rather than think about such big issues, it was far easier to recall life from only five years earlier and do one’s best to reenact that in the hope that something would change and life would normalize. We would surely remember what it was like to aspire to a humane and free existence, the very slogans that the president would periodically invoke even though no one believed them.
Such was life in 2024: the all-enveloping reality of one world gone and a new one created, but without announcement, without a public plan, and without any genuine public consensus. It all sort of just happened, somewhere and sometime in a confused mélange of masks, shots, screaming propaganda, and a prescribed strange dance to avoid a virus that everyone got anyway.
People did what they were told, by and large, and ended up with something about which only a few warned and no one promised. In the following year, even the manufactured illusion of normalcy gave way to something far worse.
