My predictions for 2222

This post may or may not have been initiated through a typo. But then it got me thinking: what WILL life look like 200 years from now? I’ll probably be a hot grandma by then… Or long dead. Bear with me while I wander through time, and come along if you’d like to take an imaginary trip with me.

The metaverse

Darn Facebook had to go and change its company name to Meta just to get us all thinking of the metaverse. While I talked about this with my partner, he brought up to me that we already are in the metaverse. I was kind of shocked, I thought this was something out of sci-fi movies. But it's here: We currently live approximately half of our lives online, or 44 years of your entire existence (based on average life expectancy) in front of a screen. If you compare that to even just 30 years ago, when we… Well, we had no internet, so this is obviously a massive difference.

The average screen time has gone up since the pandemic; and the tendency is that it will only continue to increase. Our offline time will become more and more scarce, until eventually, all we need is to be plugged into a screen or a VR headset, or another type of machine. Add crypto currencies, NFTs, and the amount of investment on R&D from top companies across the globe, and let’s see what happens.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 200 years from now, our online worlds have fully merged with our real world: Glasses and contact lenses will be connected to a network and people will access it virtually all the time. While this can make life easy in a lot of ways, it can also make it much more complicated. I am thinking of a specific Black Mirror episode here, but let’s move on.

Work

Remote work has become normal and it will continue to rise. In 2222, instead of working from a beach in Bali, you will work out of Mars. It won’t matter where you are physically, because there is no such thing as an office or in-person meetings anymore. Offline interactions are barely needed at all at this point (probably only for your basic needs, such as going to the bathroom and eating).

You no longer need to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. The newer generations have spurred a real work revolution, starting with the Great Resignation, followed by an era of self-directed investment, freelance work, and self-employment. The number of organizations has quadrupled and so did the number of openings at most companies. The workforce became smaller and pickier, so organizations had to become more flexible and creative to attract and retain employees.

A day in the life

You wake up… Whenever you wake up, you don’t need an alarm since you can start work whatever time you prefer. The first thing you do is to reach for your VR glasses and put them on, now you can chat with your personal assistant and have it order a breakfast to be delivered via drone in under 3 minutes. Your breakfast arrives, it’s a vegan pill that substitutes a meal.

Switching over to your VR contact lenses, you find yourself in a new world within your own living room. Your virtual dinosaur comes along, you pet it and continue to go on.

While catching up with your friends in the game, you split your room and work at the same time. It goes on for hours, until you realize you need to go to the bathroom, so you disconnect for a bit. You hear a knock on the door and nearly have a heart attack, who could it be? No one has visited you for 12 years now. No one would dare knock on your door without video calling you first.

The door is open.