How is the world going to be after 5 years?
Why is no one talking about this ?
In most or all of our interviews, we all have faced a question — “Where do you see yourself in 5 years ?”. I bet, most of us don’t know the answer to this question. Today, I was wondering, let’s forget about me for a moment and see how the world is going to change in the next 5 years. Let’s see what has changed in the past 5 years from 2016–2021 and then think about what’s going to happen next.
The showstopper of the last 5 years would definitely be COVID-19 which took all of our lives by a storm. But for now, let’s go back to 2016. It was one of the greatest years of this half-decade which brought a lot of new changes in this world. Pokemon Go comes into our lives and become the biggest game ever. Everyone around the whole world was searching for pokemon on the streets. Trump won the election and replaced Obama as the president of the USA. On the same day, India underwent demonetization. It was tough to engulf two of such big news for Indians. There sprang up a time for a lot of debates about who should have won as president and how demonetization would affect India’s economy. Recovering from 2016 big blows, there came 2017. Trump withdrew from the climate deal amidst a big climate crisis throughout the world. There are great data breaches across the globe and suddenly privacy and security become a hot field of interest. A new taxation system comes into force for India called — GST. People around the world, like last year, again launch into debates on what is right and what is wrong. Hate crimes and wildfires grow all across the world hand in hand. Blockchain emerges out as a new technology that would be able to solve the security issue gripping the world and bitcoin tops the charts. Governments across the globe try to prevent the loss of control over money and the economy causing a big bitcoin crash. Many lose their households.
Wifi speed increased every year making streaming a common thing all across the globe even in third world countries. Meanwhile, with increasing technological developments, the climate keeps on deteriorating. Many new activists come up, including small students like Greta Thunberg. There are oil spills, heatwaves across Europe. The people riot across the globe on various issues ranging from religion/caste/sexual orientation/race/color. Many new reforms come into place trying to lift up the suppressed and bring freedom to people across the globe. Gay marriages became legal. Everyone updated their Facebook Dps with a rainbow to show support. The elections take place in the 2 biggest democracies — India and the US. Trump loses administration to Biden whereas Narendra Modi remains unrivaled and undefeated for the second time.
Covid finally emerged and brought a halt to everything around the world. The world went into debates over various conspiracies on the origin of the virus. Millions across the globe die. Many companies switch to complete work from home. Stock markets/content creators/bitcoin/home chefs boom across the globe while the economies crash. The environment got a chance to breathe as the whole world stayed in lockdown for a while. People spent time with their families and many went into depression, mostly because instead of getting homesick they got sick of home. Various new household crimes came into existence. People buy extensively on online marketplaces where small sellers undergo huge losses. Many people lose their homes, their loved ones, and new diseases emerge along with Covid. People blame the governments around the globe and finally retrospect on what leaders they chose. Tiktok emerges as a new social media platform and takes over Facebook in no time.
Vaccines developed for the virus. The world comes back into motion, but this is a completely different world. While dealing with all this, the US withdraws its troops from Afghanistan, while the Taliban took over. The complete face of the country changed. Some people went into grave darkness, while the world leaders talk about legitimacy of the new Afghanistan Government. Bitcoin again springs back and this time, the other cryptocurrencies also see an upside with the whole world talking about it. New platforms and dapps emerge. Blockchain becomes the hottest topic replacing Artificial intelligence. Bitcoin miners grow across the globe, increasing energy needs, in turn deprecating the environment even more. Tiktok and AliExpress get banned in India, causing a big hit to small content creators and advertisers.
This is where we stand today. Where do you think, we will be moving in the next 5 years. Would the economies be able to recover? Will the stock market and cryptocurrency bubble burst to bring back recession/great depression? Well, I don’t know the answers to these questions and I don’t even want to get into these. I am going to talk about some things, making inferences from the past 5 years which will happen sure shot.
The first inevitable thing to happen is the switch from non-renewable sources to renewable sources of energy. The world will move from using petroleum-based vehicles to electric vehicles. This will not have any effect on improving climate change, because the amount of damage we would have done by then would be irreversible. The population would grow definitely along with the sea levels, shrinking inhabitable space causing global migrations. This might not happen to a large extent, but this would definitely start. Technology will grow and most of the systems that we use today would shift to web 3.0 making a large number of jobs obsolete. The camera quality will grow like it grows every year and we would have foldable phones back again.
People will get more freedom, and would one day start resisting it until they are controlled back again. New bio-weapons will come into existence with the potential of destroying the complete world within hours. New natural viruses will come into existence as we taper into the forests and the lands not designated for us. The world will move extensively to a virtual world reducing human contact to the bare minimum, striking up depression rates. There will be many unicorns built in a very short span of time.
Now the million-dollar question comes is, what are you gonna do? I know, for most of us, life did not change much in the past 5 years. We are living in the same house, are contributing nothing to this world, and making it a worse place to live already. We are running after reducing our attention spans, watching the world go by in front of us while debating over things we have no control over. Sometimes, I think, if everyone’s purpose in this life was to just sustain a living and keep the environment clean, we would not have any issues in this world. I thought to myself, but why can’t everyone act on this. The simple answer was the number of people acting on it is low. We as humans, don’t know how to plant a tree, but we know how to operate a computer or a mobile phone. That’s simply the major cause. Most of us are driven by different purposes in life- some by money, some by religion, some by freedom, some by power. But, I think it is high time to wake up, retrospect, and look at this collectively rather than thinking of our own personal needs which are mostly driven by what other people have in life.
The world surely is moving towards a shittier place. I think we should just try to make it less shitty than it is expected. We should focus more on our actions rather than debating or fighting over some man-made phenomenons like — religion/caste/creed/nationalities etc.
