Member-only story
My Trust in the Future is Dead
But my hope for it is still alive
My mom glanced at me from the driver’s seat, “You really aren’t confident in the future — or trust that everything will be okay…eventually?”
“Nope,” I answered, rolling my head lazily to look at her, “but I hope it will be.”
“Huh,” is all she said, then fell silent for a moment. We were cruising on the freeway headed to get pedicures, our new self-care ritual. There’s something about being stuck in a moving vehicle that makes you open up.
“I don’t think there’s been a time in my life when I questioned the future,” she said, more as a realization than to me, “I guess my generation was just taught that the future will always be there. We had no reason to suspect otherwise.”
I used to.
I used to dream of a guaranteed future. One full of joy and love and warmth. An eventuality where I’ll pass down my lifetime of journals to future generations.
A genuine, first-hand account of at least one experience — one person’s story of growing up during my lifetime. A time beginning before the internet, then a world adapting and changing at breakneck speeds through technology, and now, radical social change, a pandemic, and imminent global warming.
