it’s 2014; why is my mascara still running?

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s someone always posts a ‘what-we-predicted-for-the-future’ article.  It’s inevitable.  And usually the ideas presented for the present day, then the future, at that time are a strange mix of absolutely spot on and so horribly off base.

Whenever I consider the ‘future’, the images conjured are from 1982’s Blade Runner, which, if IMDB is correct was set in 2019, 5 years from now.  Floating dirigible restaurants that pull up to my moveable apartment wall, I don’t think so, but roving food trucks, well maybe, if Toronto Council will get over themselves!

There’s no Rosie the robot to clean our homes but robot vacuums, yes, which if you’re paying attention on youtube, are the favourite mobility device of the domestic cat.

Personal, portable computers, sure, and in several formats, but what are we doing with them?  Communicating yes.  Finding ways to entertain ourselves, sure.  But primarily because we’re all trapped in some sort of gridlock travelling back and forth between work and home because flying cars, streamlined transit and transporters never did materialize. 

And those devices; of which access to them is still determined by economics, meaning that educating children across economic status’ still isn’t a level playing field.

Food preparation.  If you want something decent, you still cook it.  And at my house on a gas stove that’s older than my parents.  Collecting said food, still done the old fashioned way, by going to the store and dragging it home because consumer friendly online shopping of the basics still isn’t with us in a real way. 

Online shopping – absolutely.  But delivery and returns still done via ‘snail’ mail, which is, in Canada at least, as we speak, being serviced out of existence.  And every password you use must be unique to the point of inertia.  My personal credit card password requires so many specific elements I cannot usually remember it for more than a day, and I don’t dare save it to my computer memory because the banking system isn’t hack proof.

In a lot of ways the human factor dictates how quickly we move away from known methods.  The truth is the tried and true often prevails even when it may not be the most ‘best’ way to go about something.  Landlines are still in use because when the power grid fails, and the cell networks go too, the old land line still works.  I see my friends less, but talk to them more because of social media, in fact I talk to people I don’t really know, if I’m honest because somehow the social of social media makes it possible for us to congregate.  And yet we have the highest level of single person households ever.  The future, the now, is bright, but it moves at the pace we can stand it. 

It’s all fascinating.  Some of it is digital.  But the real question is, since it’s 2014, why can’t they invent a decent mascara that does not run?