As we continue to hurtle into an uncertain and dystopian future, it’s important to take the time to enjoy the present. Even though things could be, and have been, better, it’s very likely that at some point you will remember this time period as 'the good old days.' Enjoy the now. There. That’s the sentiment, delivered with the forced cheer of a hospice nurse trying to brighten a terminal ward by suggesting a game of cards. It’s the sort of advice that sounds almost wholesome until you notice the blood seeping under the door. We are, after all, living through a period that future historians—assuming we still have historians and not just algorithmically generated content summaries delivered via neural implant—will almost certainly look back on with the same misty-eyed fondness currently reserved for the 1990s, or the Blitz, or any other era that involved slightly less sophisticated methods of making people miserable.
Consider the present carefully. We scroll endlessly through carefully curated despair, pausing only to argue with strangers about whether the latest atrocity is slightly more or less important than the previous one. Our phones buzz with notifications that someone, somewhere, has been cancelled for a joke they made in 2014, or that a new strain of something unpleasant is making the rounds, or that the weather has once again decided to behave like a poorly written villain in a disaster film. The air is thick with the low-grade anxiety of knowing that the systems holding everything together are held together by the digital equivalent of chewing gum and crossed fingers. And yet, in a few decades, some grey-haired survivor will sit in what remains of a pub—probably a VR recreation of one, with the faint smell of hops added for authenticity—and sigh about how simple it all was back then. “Remember when you could still pretend the climate was mostly fine if you just didn’t look at the charts? Remember when the AI only hallucinated mildly and didn’t yet run the government? Those were the days.”
This is the cruel joke at the heart of human nostalgia. We are hard-wired to sand the edges off the past until it becomes a soft-focus commercial for a product that never existed. The 'good old days' are always the ones that weren’t actively trying to kill you in ways you fully understood. People once fondly recalled the trenches of the First World War once enough time had passed and the mud had dried. They missed the rationing and the blackout curtains once the immediate threat of being flattened by a bomb had been replaced by the more abstract threat of nuclear annihilation. The pattern is consistent: whatever fresh hell we currently inhabit will, given sufficient temporal distance and a selective memory, acquire a certain rustic charm. Future generations will romanticise the era of performative outrage, of algorithmic radicalisation, of people filming themselves crying in their cars for engagement metrics. They will speak of it the way we speak of vinyl records—warm, imperfect, somehow more authentic than whatever sterile nightmare has replaced it.
We live in a time when you can order a meal with a few taps on a glowing rectangle, have it delivered by a stressed stranger on a bicycle, and then complain about the packaging while simultaneously fretting about the collapse of civilisation. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history, and we use it primarily to confirm that everything is falling apart and that the other side is to blame. We have medical advances that would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents, and we spend our evenings doomscrolling through lists of new ways those advances might be weaponised or monetised into irrelevance. Progress, it turns out, is less a straight line and more a drunken stagger in which we occasionally trip over our own innovations and land face-first in a fresh puddle of absurdity.
And still the advice stands: enjoy the now. Not because the now is particularly enjoyable, but because the alternative is to spend your remaining functional years in a state of permanent low-level panic, which is both exhausting and, frankly, a bit passé. The dystopia is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed and packaged with free next-day delivery. The uncertain future is not some distant horizon—it’s the next software update, the next election cycle, the next heatwave that makes the previous heatwave look like a mild inconvenience. To 'enjoy the now' is therefore less a lifestyle tip and more a form of grim stoicism. It is the decision to notice the small, temporary consolations while they still exist: the taste of coffee that hasn’t yet been synthesised from algae, the absurdity of a viral video that briefly unites strangers in shared ridicule, the brief illusion of control that comes from deleting an app only to reinstall it three days later.
There is something almost touching in the way we cling to the idea that this particular stretch of history might one day be missed. It suggests a residual optimism so deeply buried it borders on the pathological. Yes, the systems are fraying. Yes, the discourse has the intellectual coherence of a bar fight. Yes, the planet is running a temperature and the adults in the room appear to have left for a long lunch sometime around 2016 and never returned. And yet the human capacity for retrospective romanticisation remains undimmed. One day, someone will look back on the great pandemic years, the culture wars, the slow-motion technological upheaval, and decide that it all had a certain rough-hewn integrity. They will miss the freedom of still being able to log off, even if most of us never did. They will miss the relative simplicity of a world in which the machines still needed us more than we needed them.
So by all means, enjoy the now. Pour yourself a drink. Watch something frivolous. Argue with a stranger on the internet if that’s what passes for connection these days. Take a walk while the air is still, for the most part, breathable. Do it with the full knowledge that this moment—this messy, anxious, over-connected, underwhelming moment—is already being prepped for the nostalgia treatment. Future you, or more likely some distant descendant with fewer illusions and better implants, will look back and shake their head fondly. “They had no idea how good they had it,” they’ll say, conveniently forgetting that we had every idea and simply chose to doomscroll through it instead. The present is a joke told in real time. The punchline is that we’ll miss it.