Hello friends and readers! This week I was prompted by a fellow Substack writer
to imagine what a connected world might look like in 2050—and how in the heck we got from here to there. It was a fun exercise in imagination. Of course in my case—sobriety was at the center of my sobriety. Please enjoy. If you haven’t already—please drop in as a free subscriber—or buy me a coffee once a month for a mere $5. Either way, I love your comments about how you yourself might imagine 2050. It could go a lot of different ways. I choose hope—even if it’s hard to imagine.Enjoy.
The first group cares about the policy. They benefit from it. They’ve organized themselves around it.
The second group cares about stability. They have limited bandwidth, and they’re not particularly interested in reconsidering everything all the time.
The third group doesn’t care that much.
And the fourth group is harmed by the policy, either directly or indirectly.
Change happens slowly because the first three groups have power, inertia and communications on their side.
Change happens when the fourth group can create the conditions for the third group to care, and then these two groups move the urgency up the agenda.
It makes no sense to argue with the first group.
Seth Godin, Marketing Guru of the early 2000s
Free time is copious in 2050. Time to grow things. Hours to read actual books. Days to while away time in the outdoors with people we live in community with—and love. The time previously spent by humans for millennia—drinking, using, and coping has become copious free time in 2050.
Cope. Dope. Coping. Doping. Copious. Copout. Dropout. Dopehead. If you wanted to cope using dope here was your rope. To—you know—hang yourself with.
Already I digress—it’s human nature to think of what happened in the past. Not constructive but common. Surrounded by the goodness of today it’s nearly impossible to wonder how we did it. Much and much too much of a bad thing turned into so much of a good thing. You can figure it out.
In 2050 we find ourselves hopelessly addicted to peace—and to each other. Mon Dieu! Quel Surprise? One might even surmise that we desperately need one another. It has of course always been so. But it wasn’t until recent years—2042 to be exact—that we began to accept it in a profound way. The illusion of comfort and safety had been taken—by the quieting.
When it all went quiet in 2040—the believers called it the Second Coming.
Secular scientists—if you could actually find ‘em anymore—said it was an EMP. An electro-magnetic pulse. Or several. All at once.
Whatever it was—it came from above—and it worked.
We only know these things through the Telling.
It wasn’t up to the crooked FDA or Pfizer or J&J or Novartis or Glaxo or Roche or Bayer any longer to provide a numb and senseless—dis-eased existence.
About that—if I may—we’d taken care of that two decades ago when we offered those nefarious chemists and public health dis-experts a permanent residence on Pharma Island. In lieu of prosecution. Or death by mob. They were given a choice to migrate. Not a migration borne of desperation—nor of political maneuverings or profiteering or diversity—they were offered a home—to be among their own fellow miscreants. They went willingly. To test their endless disease creation and relief strategies on a plethora of nature-borne pathogens so plentiful as to delight. Previously known as Tasmania. They weren’t guarded. It seemed unnecessary. They couldn’t get off the island and nobody gave a diseased rat’s ass what they did amongst themselves. The island’s vehicles—weaponry—boat docks—airports—cell service—and internet—had all been removed.
Well—to tell it true—no place else had Internet either for that matter—but that came later. I’m jumping ahead. By early 2032 many of us had begun limiting our ideas of the outside world to—the outside world—to trees and grass and plants and animals within earshot of a normal, sober, unmedicated human being. 40 years of wandering in the wilderness—of our minds—had led to this. Not precisely as described in the Book of Exodus but reports of flowing milk and honey were being reported as of late.
The great Quit began.
Coffee was indeed the hardest—followed by weed—then nicotine—then alcohol. Lab-produced chemical intoxicants were the first to go once we transformed all worldwide production and supply chain to regional food hubs. The organic intoxicants were still hanging around. People knew how to brew—they didn’t need the Pharmorons to tell them what they did and didn’t need to take copiously to cope. Homegrown grow labs had been discovered in well-ensconced backwoods locations—but generally low-pro and servicing only local loyalists seeking a little float trip down Denial.
At first it was the Sober Warriors. Writing and speaking in the old days of the 2020s about the unvarnished joy of recovery from man-made chemicals. The Warriors waged their war on stigma and shame and kept their message simple—our brains work better than yours do. We’ve been to the dark place and have been healed. That journey gave us superpowers that we can share with you. As they pulled back the curtain and demonstrated their remarkable gifts of calm, clarity, charity, and community—others began to consider a way of living that had never occurred to them. It helped that the Pharmorons had been shoveling jabs at them like quarterly reviews during the First Sick. People were sick of the Sick and grew weary of the peddling on the streets and on their 80 curved inches of Ultra 4K OLED.
One of the century’s most popular authors, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his 2000 book The Tipping Point, that is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Indeed, those small movements had begun to coalesce back in 2025-28. More and more people of different backgrounds and political beliefs and gender and race and status and education began to feel the unrelenting pressure equally—like a full-grown donkey or elephant was actually sitting on one’s chest. The trivialities of division being fed to us like nutrients from an IV drip began to fall away. I don’t want to think or behave that way anymore. I’m sick of it and over it.
In late 2028 it got physical. Bodies began to revolt. Lifespans continued to actually shorten. Despite the longevity craze and a legion of pharma solutions designed to appease every symptom—our bodies knew. For every new miracle cure covered by the once mighty insurers—a new devastating and hidden causal effect emerged. The poisoning of our minds had manifested so powerfully in our bodies that we began to reject ourselves. Like a junkie in the first few days of going cold turkey—there was a collective and acute pain over the next few years.
For our bodies held the wisdom of the ages. Genetic memory. Somatic. Deep within our cells and our mitochondria—our bodies knew—and we had finally begun to listen. Listen to our souls with our hearts—rather than through our ears with our helplessly over-stimulated—over-medicated—confused monkey minds.
People said Fuck No. I cannot live this way anymore. Dis-ease is not normal. I don’t care what the medical establishment is telling me. I’m going to fallow. I’m going to ground. I’m going sober.
Then the stories of ascension began to surface. Some Sober Warriors were experiencing an integration of mind, body, and spirit so profound that the whispers of divinity inevitably spread. Other spiritual leaders came out of their quiet meditations to join the new song of the spirit. Healers, Yogis, Shamans, Poets.
Fear is. And it was back then. We all thought there would be more of a fight. We thought they would come for us. They certainly did come for the biggest voices—the podcasters—YouTubers—TikTokers—who had been talking far too loudly about prepping and resisting and fighting for freedom. The rest of us went even further to fallow. We dug it all up. We started from raw. We kept our heads down and our hearts full and our spirits high. The Telling network spread the message—one to one to one to several to several others.
It turned out to be unnecessary to remove the 30 Families. With hundreds of years of power in their grasp—they couldn’t be broken by us—they had to break themselves. It wasn’t physical. All of their chaos-creation for a new world order came home to roost. It was the Silencing that finally did them in. The quiet. It had to have been an EMP—but as recalled earlier—many attributed a divinity to it. That’s what really did the Families in. Millions of unprepared and under-resourced people died. Many needed to—and many wanted to. Eventually the overprepared—like the 30 FamDamnlies and their legion of supplicants—just ran out of stuff. Gas, food, water—they simply couldn’t hoard enough of it. With no currency available to ensure their continued dominance and manipulation—they broke. Their minds couldn’t grasp a pedestrian ending like starvation—many drowned themselves in what little water they had left. Or simply took one ammo magazine from the thousands that they had stored—as if they’d ever actually possessed the courage to venture out and use them on others—and they used them on themselves. Their handlers had long since fled to their own families and hobbits—many of them absconding with the very supplies meant to sustain those who’d bought the power.
The Calming took way longer than the Quieting—although one could easily draw a causal line from the former to the latter. Nearly everyone had become armed by 2030. But few possessed the skill or courage to actually use them. And no one knew exactly who those people were—except for the loudmouths—who went first. Once the Pharmorons were shut down and sequestered to the island—there was no more Testosterone replacement. The much too much of badness and anger slowly dissipated. The younger males who were still producing their own T simply saw the new path as better—and followed.
Much like recovery following a sober intervention—everyone that was still drawing polluted breath—eventually got with the program of surviving without their normal coping tools. EVs and other modern computerized automobiles simply stopped where they were. Fossil fuels were still plentiful but there was no bringing them forth from the earth without a power grid.
The manipulators were silenced. Outrage at one another went away. The sudden—for some—and slow for others—realization that we had but one common enemy—how we had been living our lives. Our hours and days were spent in search of capturing water and growing food. New friendships with neighbors we’d never seen except behind the wheel as they left their garages. They had stuff we didn’t. We had other stuff. An entire community of stuff if we could just figure out how to trade it without money. We did. And free time. Yes—free.
We began growing. From the ground. From our newly connected spirits. Our spines had literally added measurable centimeters to our vertical stature as we learned to walk upright again with our heads—freed of the downward gaze of our devices— were held upward to the heavens once again. Species returned. Nature flourished. Weapons were used sparingly to provide food.
A miracle you say!?! Indeed. Born of the spirit of the few. Carried along by the natural rebelliousness that creeps into even the most comfortably numb. And finally embedded by the simple fact that loving and living day to day was advantageous to hating and slowly dying in a hunched-over stance.
More candlelight. Much firelight. Breathtaking starlight. And ahhh—the inner light was incandescent. The nourishing and flourishing took time—but by 2050 we had caught our stride.
What did I do? Little ole me myself and I? I did what any emerging writer on Substack would do. I wrote from my experience, strength, and hope. The engine provided the audience. The content fed the believers. The paper backups eventually provided the hand-to-hand exchanges of the gospel that we see now. Our connectedness returned—real and one-to-one. Hand to hand. Heart to heart. Ground to table. Hand to mouth.
The sparks had met the fuel of indignation and unhealthy unrest. A following became a movement. That movement caught the previously over-tired sports metaphor—momentum.
A global intervention—several actually—began a balanced recovery of body and spirit. Our minds sharpened—mouths quieted—into the tools they once were before the Noise had begun five decades ago. The song of spirit soared.
In sobriety we united. One can always hope.
I never thought I'd want to be here in 2050...until now. What a great vision. Peace, joy, love and simplicity. I always love what you write. Great food for thought!
We won't let you have Tassie, btw. No way!