…and for just a few minutes, I was back in 2014. My friends messaged me, asking me if I wanted to go to the library. We'd all do homework together and chat about our simple lives, oblivious to the bleak future ahead of us. We look over to the fish tank, and from the old '80s carpet to the statue of Dobby, the House Elf, our senses were ensnared by an environment which seemed to drink in life itself and extrude personality from every pore in its surface. The fish, serene in their simple existence, must have felt a lot like us, at that moment. If only we were fish. If only we couldn't possibly comprehend the slow, trickling death of this world around us that would come with age. In truth, it had already begun. The advancement of technology was making sure of that, and little did we know, in the background, from Wall Street to Little Saint James, forces conspired to tear away everything we loved, and replace them with advertisements, or otherwise gray boxes. Soulless. Without personality. Cost effective. How I wish I was a fish, now. Now, now that I look around and see nothing but the bleeding corpse of what I once loved, now rotting in the sun like a beached whale, never to return. Once, life was easy to understand. Celebratory, even. Not without it's hard times, but there was always an undercurrent, a through line, a promise of better things to come, of a future where man, technology, and nature lived in beautiful harmony, where our innovators brought us as a people to a higher plane of existence, where culture and art continued to flourish, and with the logical endpoint being Utopia. One united human race, free of the scourges of war, poverty, and prejudice. Free to laugh, love, worship, and simply to be, at our own discretion and leisure, to say nothing of the luxury our children would enjoy. We were meant to reconcile with the Russians, welcome the Chinese into a brave new era, and lift up an Africa so horribly wrong by the sins of our fathers, and in the end, none of it happened. For the first time since the Victorian era, the defining color of the human condition in the West is gray, and gray alone. My peers sometimes call what I've described the "Promised Future", but there was no promise. Only allusions. The vague puppeteering of better days ahead by those who were and still are our masters. The endless green fields, on top of which sat glimmering metropolises, and surrounding them, wind turbines, were never meant to be. That would be too good
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