Generation Less

Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X, and A, chronicler of the internet era, codifier of minutaie of disaffected sects, neologist and cultural entrepreneur sets out his notes for the future. It’s important because Coupland’s invention of contemporary cultural concepts stick (“Legislated nostalgia: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess”), while some condemn his writing as lightweight, it works. You can read an interview with him at Next Nature here.

Here are Douglas Coupland’s 45 pointers to the future:

1) It’s going to get worse

2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now

4)Move to Vancouver, San Diego, Shannon or Liverpool

5) You’ll spend a lot of your time feeling like a dog leashed to a pole outside the grocery store – separation anxiety will become your permanent state

6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back

7) Retail will start to resemble Mexican drugstores

8) Try to live near a subway entrance

9) The suburbs are doomed, especially those E.T. , California-style suburbs

10) In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness

11) Old people won’t be quite so clueless

12) Expect less

13) Enjoy lettuce while you still can

14) Something smarter than us is going to emerge

15) Make sure you’ve got someone to change your diaper

16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze

17) You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual

18) Untombed landfills will glut the market with 20th-century artifacts

19) The Arctic will become like Antarctica – an everyone/no one space

20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989

21) We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be able to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette’s, has no medical ability not to pun

22) Your sense of time will continue to shred. Years will feel like hours

23) Everyone will be feeling the same way as you. There’s some comfort to be found there.

24) It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are

25) Dreams will get better

26) Being alone will become easier

27) Hooking up will become ever more mechanical and binary

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

29) You will have more say in how long or short you wish your life to feel

30) Some existing medical conditions will be seen as sequencing malfunctions

31) The built world will continue looking more and more like Microsoft packaging

32) Musical appreciation will shed all age barriers

33) People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s

34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

35) Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people. You will live in a world without kings, only princes in whom our faith is shattered

36) Metaphor drift will become pandemic

37) People will stop caring how they appear to others

38) Knowing everything will become dull

39) IKEA will become an ever-more-spiritual sanctuary

40) We will become more matter-of-fact, in general, about our bodies

41) The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed

42) You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell

43) Getting to work will provide vibrant and fun new challenges

44) Your dream life will increasingly look like Google Street View

45) We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves

Go here for ‘all the answers.’