Future Cringe

MICHAEL MUSTO, columnist

Gender-reveal parties will become totally obsolete when people realize that you won’t know the baby’s gender until quite some time later.

And the current trend of binge-watching — we’ll look back and say, “Can you believe people thought having watched a season of ‘Wednesday’ was something to brag about to complete strangers on social networks? That must have been before we got a life.”

KEVIN KELLY, co-founder, Wired magazine

Having your first name decided by your parents will be as unfashionable as having them pick who you marry. Believing the amount you pay in taxes should be private. Eating dead animals. Not being able to have two spouses at once. Fearing human clones. (They are serial twins.) Wrapping food in plastic. Thinking you needed permission to visit another country. Getting off the summer from school. Carrying a screen around in our pockets. Having daylight saving time, changing clocks twice a year. Objecting to face recognition by machines. Wanting to live in space. Accepting bombs in war as OK. Dying from cancer.

SARAH THYRE, actress

Using the word “journey” to describe anything other than a perilous trek through Middle-earth to throw the One Ring of Power into a volcano. (Also: You must be a hobbit.)

NATASHA STAGG, essayist, novelist

I think we’re probably going to be embarrassed by the pandemic, every kind of reaction to it and the way it’s sort of defined our time. To me, it’s already sort of becoming an embarrassing topic, and you can feel people not wanting to talk about it, because it brings back these very recent memories of us behaving in a way that was not the way we’re behaving now.

I mean, I’m included in this. I feel embarrassed about being a little irrational about certain topics and the politicization of every single thing that happened in that whole time period, where how people handled their own health was a political topic. And that just doesn’t make rational sense. Also, how every single thing in our lives — even what music we listen to and what art we see — you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda. I think that will eventually feel embarrassing, or it’ll hopefully turn into something else, because I feel like there’s no end to that thought process. It makes people go a little crazy and become conspiracy theorists or just totally isolated from all of their friends.

EUAN RELLIE, investment banker

Microdosing. I mean, I don’t want to be an advocate for narcotics or suggest that taking drugs is a good idea. But it does strike me that if you’re going to take them, the idea of taking a tiny, tiny amount so you hardly notice it seems a strange strategy.

JOAN JULIET BUCK, writer, former editor in chief, Vogue France

Forty years ago, I was so aware of the oil crisis that I felt guilty playing Pong, one of the first electronic games. I imagined that in the future no one would waste electricity on playing games. Today, I think I’ll eventually be embarrassed to admit that I love a juicy steak, cook indoors with gas, fly across the Atlantic multiple times in a year and drive a hybrid that still needs gasoline.

MARK MANSON, author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”

I think global celebrities as we currently conceive of them (movie stars, pop stars, et al.) will turn out to be a strange aberration of human culture. The idea that most of the planet followed and cared about a couple dozen people who sang songs or appeared in films will strike us as strange and embarrassingly conformist.

And testing people based on memorized information will become an awkward memory in a world full of artificial intelligence. The same way we look back on the ridiculousness of grading kids by the quality of their handwriting 100 years ago, we will look back at tests based on memorization as a colossal waste of time and talent.

CRYSTAL MOSELLE, filmmaker

I’m embarrassed that we didn’t create a campaign for forgiveness earlier. I think there will probably be a wave of forgiveness, because of all the cancel culture. I think the next thing that’s going to happen is people actually wanting to forgive and giving people chances and opportunities for change. I think generally our planet needs that shift so badly — and so I think we’ll be embarrassed that we let cancel culture go on so long.

And the basic stuff: I’ll be embarrassed that I drove a car. I’ll be embarrassed that I didn’t believe in teleportation. Embarrassed that I wasn’t excited about going to the moon.

MARIE FAUSTIN, comedian, writer

Right now, dating is very much hookup culture, and everybody feels like they’ve got options, endless options. I think in the next 30 or 40 years, it’ll swing back around. People are going to be like, “You were just in situation-ships with people, doing all relationship things, but they weren’t calling you their girlfriend? Wow.” People are going to say, “I can’t believe you guys were dating like that in the 2020s.”

AGNIESZKA PILAT, artist

Selfies (and social media as we know it). Because our relationship to data and to privacy has to change drastically, I strongly believe that selfies on social media will be something we will look back at with embarrassment. Posting close-ups of our faces, our families with locations and time stamps, will seem terribly reckless. The amounts of information we give up for free because of our vanity will seem not only stupid but also tasteless.

BILL SCHULZ, TV writer, journalist

You know how the very idea of a phone conversation, regarding anything that can otherwise be texted, seems rude at this point? I think we’ll feel the same way about face-to-face conversations 20 years from now, whether it be a random interaction on the street or having dinner with actual friends. It will seem offensive to “future us” if a person attempts actual verbal contact.

RACHEL RABBIT WHITE, poet

We’ve spent years caught on digital hamster wheels, spinning solipsistically in our most base states: angry, jealous, needing to be accepted. It’s almost cute, in a tragic way, the fact that we’ve been driven by such a human and vulnerable need — to be liked.

Our continued embrace of the internet, after we realized it was making us spiritually decrepit, is embarrassing. After all, there are still other forms of connection, ways to find and share information, art, jokes and entertainment (if that’s what social media is for). I’m no tech futurist, so I’m no good at predictions, but I will say it’s cringe to not have a New York Public Library card in 2023. I just got one. I can only hope it will save me from further embarrassment.

ELIE MYSTAL, lawyer, author of “Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution”

I anticipate that, within my lifetime, though perhaps near the end of my lifetime, the thing that will look stupid is our gun fixation. We are right now in a time period where we are the most violent industrialized nation. I think that in the future we’ll look back at our time the way people now look back on the Wild West. We are actually more violent than they were in the allegedly Wild West.

And a silly one: light bulbs. Eventually, they will go the way of whale-oil lamps. The idea that this is the year 2023 and I’ve got a light above my kitchen sink that I can’t get to in a one-man job? My wife has to get up on the sink, kind of straddle it, and I’ve got to spot her. To change one light bulb. Big Light Bulb has us by the neck, and that can’t last forever!

RACHEL TASHJIAN, writer of the fashion newsletter Opulent Tips

The thing I think people will be embarrassed about in the years to come is “gorp-core.” It’s a trend, or I would even say a movement, within men’s fashion to fetishize outdoor and performance clothing. You might be someone who hikes or who rock climbs or who runs ultramarathons, and you bring that kind of clothing and the gear into your everyday life. I don’t think it’s embarrassing now. I mean, I think it looks pretty cool. But I think it will be something that will not age well.

CHRIS STEIN, guitarist, songwriter, co-founder of Blondie

C.G.I. will be very embarrassing in the future. Every action movie has the same stupid monster with the glowing embers under the skin, and it just gets ridiculous. I don’t know if other people see it the same way, but I feel like C.G.I. is inevitably going to look so dated.

CHI OSSÉ, Member, New York City Council

I think professional clothing is something that’s going to be so cringe. Ties are so dumb. I’m wearing one right now but they’re literally these strips of fabric that don’t have a purpose, except for upholding some level of professionalism. It’s a weird way for humans to express themselves and, worse, it’s uncomfortable.

The second thing: I’m gay and I think L.G.B.T.Q. and saying L.G.B.T.Q. is going to become so cringe. It’s a lot of letters. I think “queer” is something that’s all encompassing and represents the entire community as a whole.

SOPHIE ELGORT, photographer

It’s somehow acceptable to walk down the streets with our phones in front of our faces, not paying attention to where we’re walking and walking into others and straight into things. I hope that will seem ridiculous.

BEBE BUELL, singer-songwriter, memoirist

I think we’re going to regret the murder and slaughter of so many animals in such an inhumane way. Meat, the way we treat animals — we’re going to look back and be mortified that this is the way we lived.

BENJAMIN GODSILL, art adviser

There’s this feeling that we are all somehow terminally unique and more important than any other beings, and we’re broadcasting that uniqueness by what we like and eat and listen to and look like and wear. I think that will be super embarrassing. I’m super guilty of it. I know all about food and wine and esoteric music and bands from the 1970s or what have you. And it’s, like, come on, you’re just a middle-aged bro!

DAVID BARBER, co-founder, Blue Hill Farm

The more privileged tribes of the human species run around eating, building businesses and living in make-believe ecosystems that ignore the fact that Mother Nature has a balance sheet. We are stealing from it without accounting for it. Our grandchildren are likely to look back at us and say: What were you thinking?

EILEEN KELLY, podcast host, model

I have poured myself out on the internet; I have a podcast obviously where I talk about every little detail of who I’m dating, who I’m having sex with. I just think this whole generation I’m a part of is used to that. I see people posting their babies online and posting very personal things like changing a diaper, and I am, like, your child is going to grow up and not have consented to having that on the internet! And I think those kids, when they grow up, having been put online for their whole lives, they are going to switch in the other direction.

DAWN EDEN GOLDSTEIN, author, theologian

I would certainly like to think that when people look back at human society in the early 2020s, they will be surprised and embarrassed to think about how even in what we consider such a modern age people who have problems with mental health or alcoholism or substance addictions are still afraid of getting help — fearful because of a social stigma. Beyond that, I think people are going to be embarrassed about how strongly the Puritan ethic carried into 2020s America, that we still have this Andrew Carnegie idea that we’ve got to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

C.S. LEDBETTER III, staff member, The New Yorker’s fiction department

I think people will be embarrassed, or should be, by: wearing trousers just below one’s pubic region; pushing domestic pets in baby strollers; pretending a bow tie worn with a T-shirt (and nothing else) is acceptable evening wear; interrupting church services to take conference calls; listening to political pundits; listening to financial pundits; buying any kind of exercise equipment.

MIKE FORNATALE, musician

What I want to think is that people will look back at this period and be ashamed of the cutthroat, anything-to-get-ahead attitude of big business and Wall Street. But that’s what I said when “Glengarry Glen Ross” came out, so I don’t think I’m much of a sage in that regard.

ARI WALLACH, author of “Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs — An Antidote to Short-Termism”

It’s not necessarily about a hairstyle or a fashion trend or something like that. Really, what we will look back on and be embarrassed about — it could be five years from now or it could be several hundred years — is the whole YOLO attitude that is really at the root cause of a lot of our problems in the world. “You only live once.” “Follow your bliss.” It’s all about you, right now.

I think that will be embarrassing. What our descendants will look back on is a temporal narcissism. They’ll look back on us and be like: How did they not see themselves as ancestors to us? This idea that you wear something two or three times and then get rid of it, given the amount of resources and water and the labor conditions of what go into fast fashion — I think folks will look back on that as a symptom of, again, temporal narcissism, where it’s all about our lives in the moment.