Future Burnout: On the False Promises & Expectations of What Comes "Next"
Future Burnout: On the False Promises & Expectations of What Comes "Next"
The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Akili Moree.
Moree is a cultural theorist and strategist, analyzing how technology shapes culture, and exploring its impact on identity, community, and social change. At 22, he brings a fresh perspective to understanding our digital landscape. He recently founded RODEO, an advisory firm that provides brand strategy and cultural insights to companies looking to connect with youth. You can find him on TikTok as @akili3000.
One of the central anxieties that has permeated culture for the past decade has been a temporal one.
We've been living in an argument between the future and the past – a tug-of-war between the glistening promise of what's to come and the comforting nostalgic pull of what once was. It’s also a battle between the dread which looms and the dark past which haunts.
This tension of future vs. past plays out in countless ways, both big and small. It's in the breathless hype surrounding each new technological breakthrough, contrasted with the wistful longing for simpler times and reboot mania. It's in the constant, energetic churn of social content, where each moment is viewed as a performance to be documented and dissected in the future, set against the backdrop of a yearning for a more conventional, authentic, and analog existence.
It manifests itself in our politics, too. We see it in the clash between those who champion progress and those who cling to tradition, between those who envision a radically different future and those who seek to restore a bygone era.
Perhaps, most poignantly, this anxiety is felt not just on a collective, but on a personal level. It's the nagging sense that time is slipping away, that we're not doing enough, that we're not living up to our full potential, that...
The pandemic and its ability to expose our mortality amplified this itch, toying with our perception of time and how much of it we have left.
Meanwhile, from an industrial perspective, there’s the obsession with tracking, analyzing, and critiquing the past to conjure predictions about the future, and the undergirding fear that we must be fully prepared for what’s to come before it even arrives.
This temporal anxiety is, in many ways, a new type of burnout, a burnout on the future.
Spielberg's 2002 Minority Report was prescient in many regards. Based on a 1956 short story, the futuristic film starring Tom Cruise demoed tech spanning gesture-based computing, driverless cars, personalized ads, facial recognition, voice-controlled homes and predictive policing — each decades before adoption.
But the film’s most impressive display of the future was a single throwaway line from a Precog – a character relied upon to see into the future to prevent crime:
In our quest to bridge the chasm between past and future, technology has become both the accelerant of our condition, and the supposed remedy for such temporal anxieties.
Each new iPhone boasts a camera more powerful than the last, promising to capture every fleeting moment in stunning detail. What else are we buying it for at this point? The iPhone camera has evolved from a simple tool for documentation to a portal for revisiting the past, a way to preserve our experiences in a world that feels increasingly ephemeral. Live photos, case and point.
This is no longer about taking better photos; it's about creating a digital archive of our lives, a curated collection of moments that we can revisit whenever we want. We scroll through our photo libraries, not just to remember what happened, but to relive the emotions, the sensations, the very essence of those experiences. It's a way to combat the feeling that time is slipping away, to hold onto the past even as we hurtle towards the future.
The Vision Pro takes this concept to a new level, offering a fully immersive experience that blurs the lines between memory and reality. This is poignantly captured in one of its promotional videos. The film opens on a scene bathed in a nostalgic, amber glow as a child and his grandfather share a moment of joy at the piano. As the camera pulls back, we're drawn into a new reality. A woman sits in her living room, the sleek lines of the Vision Pro headset framing her eyes. She's not watching a screen. She's immersed in a memory, reliving the scene of her child and father playing the piano. The headset creates an intimate, personal space, allowing her to experience the past with stunning clarity. The headline, "Be in the moment. All over again," superimposed over the video, speaks to the device's promise: a chance to relive your memories, to step back into the past with a clarity and immediacy that transcends traditional photographs and videos.
But as we know, technology has its own biases towards time. In fact, it doesn’t respect it. The blinking digital clock flashes indefinitely, compared to an analog clock face, offering context and progress. Tech enchants us away from circadian rhythms, seasonality, planetary positions, harvests and moon phases. We can’t rely upon it for any semblance of time, as that crutch is a faulty one.
The digital clock has become the unflinching overseer of modern life, an incessant reminder of the schedules we must keep and the obligations we must fulfill. It holds us captive to a relentless, artificial tempo – a soulless metronome.
It's strange to imagine a time before the tyranny of the 6:00 AM email check, when sleep wasn't a single, brutal block of unconsciousness squeezed between frantic activity and the predictable blaring of an alarm.
But that time did exist. In the sixteenth century, long before magazine editors began canonizing the sleep schedules of hyper-productive CEOs, humans embraced a different rhythm, a segmented sleep that unfolded in two distinct acts punctuated by an hour or two of wakefulness. This segmented sleep style ended with the advent of artificial lighting. Tech.
Now, of course, we've optimized those hours away, sacrificing the liminal space between our waking and dreaming selves at the altar of efficiency.
It seems as though technology has suggested to us that we are the colonizers of time, and that we can conquer and subdue its natural flow, bending it to our will with augmented reality goggles and endless streams of notifications, which have become the furniture of modern life.
But time, of course, remains undefeated. It strolls on, indifferent to our best efforts to control it, leaving us stranded in a perpetual state of anxiety, stretched thin and brittle by our insatiable desire to conquer both the future and the past.
Perhaps it is fitting then that we have fallen victim to the allure of the 22 year old TikTok sensation Nara Smith. At five feet and eleven inches tall, with almond shaped eyes and a face that seems simultaneously classic and modern, there’s a calm intensity to Nara, and an elegance that comes across no matter what she’s doing. “While my toddlers were playing in the backyard they asked me for a Capri-Sun,” she says in her classic monotone affect. Draped in a delicate gown with sleeves that fan out like soft waves, she lays out an assortment of fruits onto a cutting board, “I told them to give me a minute while I got started,” she says.
Most of Nara’s videos begin in a similar fashion — she glides into frame, fully made up and dressed as though she’s on her way to a special occasion. Whether it’s her children asking for Cinnamon Toast Crunch or her husband running out of moisturizer, Nara calmly sets about creating whatever is requested, always from scratch.
She is the face of a growing number of female influencers who embrace what many now call the “Trad Wife Aesthetic,” short for traditional wife. This aesthetic channels a bygone era, where a woman's primary role was seen as that of a homemaker and nurturer. It romanticizes the idea of a wife who dedicates herself to creating a cozy and welcoming home, preparing delicious meals from scratch, and raising well-mannered children.
A recent GQ spread noted,
“Nara has become an avatar for a corner of social media that glorifies old-fashioned family structures and the wholesome, quasi-religious aesthetics of housewifery.”
However, it’s safe to say that this “corner” of the internet has crept into the mainstream. At ten million followers, Nara Smith has crafted a large and dedicated audience. Millions tune into her videos weekly, and she’s graced the pages of Elle, Interview Magazine, GQ, and the New York Times.
Nara's meticulously staged domesticity is less an earnest embrace of tradition and more a savvy recognition of the internet's underlying logic: to succeed in the future, one must cloak themselves in remnants of the past.
Nara’s audience loves her nostalgic conservatism because it reorients them away from today’s particular brand of anxieties – climate dread, late capitalism, AI uncertainties, etc.
It’s easy to become enchanted by the robotic, artificial energy she exudes. How she carefully modulates her tone and cadence, how her face seems to never move, how her hair and makeup are eternally spotless – it’s hypnotizing. Just like artificial intelligence, which conjures the illusion of sentience from the cold, hard data of the past, Nara uses the past as a source of raw material to be mined, repackaged, fed back to us, and ultimately monetized.
Artificial intelligence — the epitome of our tension between past and future — is, according to documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis:
“[A] strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist.”
At the conclusion of Minority Report we learn that the lauded predictive crime unit is flawed — free will exists and what’s foreseen is not absolutely determined.
We learn that our past and predictions are not laws, but ideas at best.
Perhaps what we ultimately require at this moment is to untangle ourselves from both the past and future, and to reorient ourselves back into the present moment. The only thing we truly have.
Perhaps we strengthen the muscle to resist the urge to endlessly document and relive, to silence the relentless ticking of the digital clock, to stop manically predicting what is inevitably in our control and to instead simply be – a radical act of rebellion in our temporally lost world.