Life in 2030 makes me nervous

I am anxious.

When I gaze into the screen-lit, Alexa-led, drone-dropped future, I am anxious.

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I study the future for a living, but when it comes to actually living in these changing technological times, I’m a skeptic. I eschew many aspects of our always on, constantly connected culture of oversharing. I hate talking about my health and think someone’s personal fitness regimen is about as interesting as their favorite credit card. I fear what the creation and dispersion of our digital identities will do to our self-perceptions. I think efficiency has become too high of a priority. I think democracy has no place in cultural critique. I’m nervous that the open platform promise of the Internet gave way to near-monopolies whose dominance would make robber baron Andrew Carnegie jealous and who control something much more powerful than our money: our minds.

Admittedly most of my distaste for technology stems from personal weakness. You don’t hate McDonald’s. You hate that you want McDonald’s. I don’t hate technology. I hate that, in so many private battles over my attention, it wins.

Can curiosity cure anxiety? To see, I surrendered. I committed myself to living the most futuristic life possible for a month. I downloaded apps, used the digital equivalent of conventional things whenever I could, and I kept a little diary.

This is what I learned…

I made a lot of money for doing nothing. I made hundreds on AirBnB and dozens with Wag! (a dog walking app deserving of its self-appointed exclamation point). It felt good, too, helping tourists and harried dog owners. I can think of absolutely no downside to this trend of paying me to play with puppies and go on vacation.

I saved a bit of money and I don’t miss it. I put some auto-deposit money in Betterment and signed up for Acorns. Simple, fun, and may very well help me retire.

I vacationed like a local. AirBnB apartment. Apps to meet locals. Maps to look informed. Yelp for good bars.

I lived like a king. Handy for the home. Uber private driver. TaskRabbit to hang the painting. TaskRabbit to stand in line. Everything an hourly wage away, paid for by AirBnB earnings.

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I became an efficiency-maximizing machine… I would cancel an Uber if it was more than four minutes away.

…who wasted more time than ever. In exploring Tumblr, SnapChat, YikYak, Whisper, I went down dozens of Internet black holes that took way more than four minutes to crawl out of.

The future: always in a rush to waste time on the Internet.

I made mistakes with ease and grace. I ordered bananas on Amazon Prime Now. I thought “quantity” meant number of bananas. In fact it meant number of bunches of bananas. I will never stop finding it amusing that one time I had 70 bananas delivered to my door in less than an hour.

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I went on a lot of boring dates. Meeting someone at a bar, a party, there’s a certain spontaneity. I allow myself the unconventional. I openly think past my “type.” But online I’m a closed-off, over-analytical optimizer, eliminating curated contenders for even the most minor compatibility violations (“Could I marry someone who wears orange?”).

During the text-led lead-up to a date, I felt less like a person and more like a speech bubble, striving to be interesting but not weird, interested but not eager, busy but not overworked, flexible but not too available. I needed to be free at a very specific time and needed to fit a very specific type. A TaskRabbit for romance.

The dates I went on, we ended up having so much in common we had nothing to talk about.

I watched too much TV. The revolution will be binge watched. So I surrendered. And then, as revolutions are wont to do, it took over. Kimmy Schmidt. Breaking Bad. OJ Simpson. The excess became comfortable. Portlandia. Empire. Seinfeld. Sex and the City.

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It was all very entertaining without being satisfying. Stripped of suspense, the whirl of plot twists was delicious but empty, spritzed with the guilt of a man who lost control.

I doubted the Wisdom of the Crowd.  “Unrealized potential. It felt unfinished.” – Amazon Shopper J. Norburn on The Sound and the Fury.

I got less patient and more demanding. When you have a ClassPass Kore class starting in 10 minutes, you have no time for lines.

I got anxious… Am I getting enough likes? Am I posting too many pictures? Why is he liking my photo but not texting me back? Should I text back now or wait? Oh my god delete that. Don’t you dare post that. I’m not kidding at all.

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…but I resolved it. I have always wanted to meditate, in large part because both Oprah and Ellen do. I finally do now thanks to the Headspace app. That little ladder of accomplishment and those daily reminders really got me. A victory for the connected age (an ironic victory, since my phone saved me from my phone).

So what have I concluded?

• In the future we will be much busier but we will get less done.
• We will be liberated from chores but chained to work.
• We will be happily connected but never get enough validation.
• We will never lose touch or lose stuff; we will never get lost or locked out.
• We’ll have immediate everything on-demand, and patience will be an outdated concept.
• We will go out with our perfect match, and when we gaze into the eyes of our algorithmic ideal, we’ll be overcome with curiosity about the matches unmet.
• We will be financially prepared for retirement with a calm, well-meditated mind. Headspace filled with Acorns.
• We won’t be in better shape, but we will feel more guilty about it.
• We will only eat good food and watch good TV (★★★★★).

I am unexpectedly excited for this future if I can figure out how to use it right.

Will I be a fanny-pack’ed Spanish tourist trampled by the bulls of technological determinism? Or a jet-pack’ed superhero beta-tested to perfection by my cloud-connected brain?

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Dan Clay is a senior associate at Lippincott, a creative consultancy.