What's All This I Hear About 2025?

Blaming the past, predicting the future

If you know, you know.

So, we’ve started a new year. We’re full of hopes and fears for it. Why? We humans are laughable in our persistent hope that with a new year, which begins on an arbitrary date, things might get better — but as I wrote last week, there’s something beautiful about that too.

Of course, many of us are filled with trepidation about 2025 and the project named for it. But whether we feel hope or fear, or both, we can’t seem to get away from expecting new things in a new year — though we really have no idea what might happen.

Don’t blame 2024

In the meantime, the previous year gets a bad rap. As if it were 2024’s fault that a convicted felon won the presidential election. That it was the hottest year ever recorded. That Jimmy Carter died.

Like most years, 2024 was a mixed bag. Bad things happened, good things happened, neutral things happened. But you wouldn’t know it from memes like this one:

The truth is, we’re living in particularly crazy times, and they’ve been going on for much longer than a year. Each year is so crazy that we look back on it in dismay. We have to hope the next one will be better, because how do we get through these times if not with hope? But it will take more than a new year for things to improve.

What about 2025?

One thing does feel new about 2025.

Because I’m old, I have to do some mental calculations anytime someone suggests that 2000, or even 2010, was a long time ago. I mean, it’s been just a couple decades since the 1980s, hasn’t it?

I’m sure this feeling is nothing new to old people around the world, who have been feeling it since time immemorial. But it’s new to me. It may also have to do with the fact that the first 39 years of my life took place in the last millennium. Any year beginning with a 2 sounds recent to me.

So imagine my shock — even surprise! — when I realized we’re a quarter of a century into this millennium. Should I have been surprised? Of course not. But there it is. It feels like just yesterday that we were worrying about Y2K (though to be honest, I never worried about it), and here we are, 25 years later and worse for the wear. With a society that’s gone backwards in many ways instead of forwards.

It’s hard to know what to expect from 2025, or any future year.

Who knows what the future holds

Have you heard of Professor Archibald Montgomery Low? I hadn’t till I read about him in The Guardian the other day. A British scientist and inventor, Low was a pioneer in many fields.

In 1925, perhaps because Yogi Berra had only just been born and had yet to let us know that “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Professor Low made some audacious ones for 2025.

Like everyone who makes predictions, he got many of them wrong. What’s remarkable is how many he got right.

Setting aside his regrettable sexism, Professor Low was spot-on with a lot of his predictions. I couldn’t agree with him more about the horrors of alarm clocks. And hey, we might still get mind-to-mind electrical communication one of these years, though I’m not standing in line to participate.

But as interesting as it is to see what this guy predicted, both right and wrong, it’s even more instructive to see what he didn’t.

Some of the items missing from his list wouldn’t have been so hard to envision. I see no mention of weapons that can wipe out entire cities in one blow — a logical extension of the idea of weapons, which has been around forever. People have been imagining artificial intelligence, now in its early stages, for a long time.

But some staples of our modern life would have been much tougher to anticipate. The internet? Online shopping, with its incessant requests for ratings? Smartphones? Social media, for heaven’s sake? Who would have dreamed those up?

Hints of the internet, if you could call them that, turn up in early science fiction by the likes of Mark Twain and E.M. Forster — who knew! But they’re only hints, and writers of fiction can create whatever they want without it being a prediction of what will really happen.

What we can’t imagine

When I was in high school, my friends and I wished we had some kind of walkie-talkie to keep in touch. I dreamed of having my own film projector so I could watch whatever movie I wanted in my living room.

We have those things now. But I never imagined our “walkie-talkies” would be powerful computers that fit in our pockets and connect us to the world. I never imagined streaming services would replace TV. I never imagined people would forget how to use maps because they relied so much on GPS.

Let’s face it — even when social media came along, we didn’t know it would be used to manipulate our elections and further divide our country. And how could we dream up the enshittification of online platforms when we hadn’t even imagined online platforms?

That’s just technology. I wouldn’t have predicted that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. That “trad wives” would be a thing. That I’d agree with Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Brooks. That our very democracy would be at stake — at the same time as we’re facing a climate emergency and an ongoing global pandemic.

If anyone had written a novel or movie twenty years ago depicting the shit show that is the modern Republican party, they would have been mocked for being too unrealistic. Yet here we are.

In this upside-down world, it’s more futile than ever to try to predict the future. I can’t tell you how many headlines I’ve encountered in my day job speculating about the future of clean energy under the upcoming administration. The truth is, we don’t know what will happen. It makes sense to be prepared for the scenarios we can think of so we can best deal with them, to shore up our defenses, to get our ducks in a row. (And if you’re a homeowner considering solar or a heat pump, now’s the time!) But the predictions are getting old.

We don’t know what will happen — and even though that feels more true than ever, it’s nothing new. It’s a good bet that the next four years will be rough, but the details will emerge as they emerge. For now, the best we can do is find ways to take positive action, make space for joy, and always wish, “May the best thing happen.”