Did Your Idea Of The World And The Future Become The Reality You Dreamed Of When You Were 16?

I came across this picture today and sat there staring at it for a while, thinking back to my young days just before I left school in 1981, when I was 16….

I can remember sitting in an English class in my last year of school and the English teacher asked us to write a short essay of what we thought the future would be like in the year 2000, when I would have reached the grand old age of 35…



Obviously, like all kids do you write about flying cars, moving pavements, being able to fly from the UK to Australia in 5 hours, time travel, and basically thinking that all the Star Trek scientific knowledge we watched on TV, would by that time become reality…

We were young, the times were dark due to the new reign of Maggie Thatcher and the Tory government, but there was some kind of brightness in our hearts of a brilliant and brightly coloured future, after all, things couldn’t get worse, could they?

Now when you look at the bottom half of the picture you see the other side of the coin and a world full of disaster and despair. This I feel is how many people today look at life and the times that we are in at this very moment. But thinking about it, all the fighting, cruelness, heartache and disasters have never really gone away, have they? Even though the future seemed rosy and bright at the age of 16, nothing really got better, did it? In fact things tended to get far worse and was topped off by one of the worst so called terrorist attacks known to man on New York, just after the new millennium had in fact just started…

I think that when you are younger you don’t tend to always be aware what is happening in the world, you are mostly existing in a world of adventure and exploration and finding your feet. But as you tend to grow older you begin to realize what a mess man has made of this world and in fact things are not really going to get very much brighter, well not as you thought they were going to be when you were 16….

I just wondered what people here on ATS thought about when they saw the picture and what it conjured up in your mind. What were your thoughts on your future when you were younger? Did you expect a damn sight more and things to be better than this?….

Do you sometimes wish you were 16 again?

Cheers…….

I'm still waiting for the hover board from back to the future 2. I guess I never imagined the Internet or its potential back then, it was a pretty crumby experience in the 1990s. Things took a real turn for the worse on 9/11. It's all been going down hill since then. Not sure if I'd want to be 16 at this point. Most things have become too commercialised and the prospects for a 16 year old today are bleak compared to those in the 1990s.

I was a dumbass when I was 16, like most 16 year olds are. I thought communism, leather pants, and drugs were a good idea.

Coincidentally, the world is just as #ed up as I thought it would be, except when I was 16 I thought I would be dead by now.

When I was 16 or so, I remember wishing the whole world would destroy itself and go to hell.

It's still here, so my vision never came to be.

Teenagers eh?

Originally posted by woodwardjnr
I'm still waiting for the hover board from back to the future 2. I guess I never imagined the Internet or its potential back then, it was a pretty crumby experience in the 1990s. Things took a real turn for the worse on 9/11. It's all been going down hill since then. Not sure if I'd want to be 16 at this point. Most things have become too commercialised and the prospects for a 16 year old today are bleak compared to those in the 1990s.

edit on 6-9-2013 by woodwardjnr because: (no reason given)

Yeah, that was one thing I did mean to add to my thread about the Hover boards, from Back to the Future...haha.......and the internet, what a great invention to bring to the world, but it all seems to be used in such a rubbish kind of way, where advertising and commercialism follow you around like a bad smell and won't leave you alone....and I personally wouldn't want to be a 16 year old now either, preferred being 16 when I was 16............

Originally posted by DeadSeraph
I was a dumbass when I was 16, like most 16 year olds are. I thought communism, leather pants, and drugs were a good idea.

Coincidentally, the world is just as #ed up as I thought it would be, except when I was 16 I thought I would be dead by now.

Similar to you DeadSeraph, without going into too much detail I also believed that I would be dead before I was 21, due to one reason or another, but hey, I am still here.............

Originally posted by nerbot
When I was 16 or so, I remember wishing the whole world would destroy itself and go to hell.

It's still here, so my vision never came to be.

Teenagers eh?

There is still time for your vision to come true.......

I had my sixteenth birthday in March of 2001.

At that time, there was all manner of dark crap on the horizon, but I was riding a wave of being a few months away from never having to go back to my school again. I knew I would be free, or at least a closer approximation of it than I had ever been before!

It was a dangerous place, and so my joy at the prospect of never having to return made me feel pretty good in some respects. Right around that period, my mother and father were divorcing as well, so (weirdly) everything was alright with me. I was playing cricket regularly, and all I was thinking about the future was, " I wonder what it will be like to re-sit my GCSE's at a proper educational facility, rather than the insane place I have just left. I wonder if I will make actual friends? I wonder, if after all I have been through, I am capable of normal interaction with other people?"

However, regarding my desire for the FUTURE? That hope had already been dashed! It was 2001, and there was no base on the moon, Arthur C Clarkes vision of our time had not been realised, and our petty and pathetic squabbles as a species were still gutting our planet of resources, destroying lives by the countless thousands, and would only get worse in years to come, all of which was holding us back, and by my reckoning we were at least forty to fifty years behind our optimal pace of advancement.

That said I had just signed up to my first email account that year (and have kept since, and is still my only mail service online), and had begun conversing with people over the internet, from all over the world. I remember taking my first stumbling steps in cyberspace, thinking to myself "Isnt this all just a little pedestrian? Why is this thing so SLOW?". That was the final nail in the coffin of my dreams really. It was only when I first hit the net, when I realised just how boned we were, and that even my now modified hopes for the future were still going to be scuppered before they were born.

And I was right in all my concerns, so it turned out. September of that year saw an unforgettable moment in history, which I happened to be watching the news channels at just the right moment to catch the begining of and saw the entire fiasco unfolding from end to end. This lead to the scenario we are all facing now, and after that event, I really didnt expect anything else. I remember saying to a friend of mine, who happened to be watching those events with me on the day "You know what? Its bad enough that all these people are dying, and who ever did this is going to be seriously boned, but that aside, this crap just doomed our future to be just like our past."

It was that moment that totally destroyed my hope that this species would actually begin to colonise space, or develop relativistic propulsion methods of any kind, let alone a decent warp drive, or indeed the powerplant required to run one, within my lifetime. Given that my most honest, and wonder filled dreams when I was five years old, were of actually working and living in space, as depicted by the works of Clarke and others, actually living out there as a matter of course, rather than being Earthbound in an era where space flight was still by offical appointment, rather than the same as getting on a plane and hopping the channel, given that I had modified that desire to "colonies within my lifetime, served by craft capable of doing an Earth - Mars run in two weeks." I found all that a bit of a downer.

It is now my belief that this species will not even colonise the moon before I die. I will not live to see the actual creation of a warp drive or anything similar, since we are only taking the baby steps to understanding the mass manipulator that is the Higgs Boson. By the time I die, I doubt wether we will even have worked out how to avoid killing one another.

reply to post by davethebear


My last post in this thread was about the future as the abstract that we all dream of, the glimmering veiw of a possible future world. The global future.

This one is about how I imagined my personal life would evolve under ideal conditions. When I was sixteen, all I wanted to do was get my qualifications, which institutional education systems in this country had basically ensured that I would not get, and then get on with the important business of providing for myself, helping my mother out, and getting on with life. All I wanted when I was done with college (re-sit GCSE course, which I nailed after a year, rather than failing after eleven years, as had happened at school), was to get myself a job, and live within my means. Even getting work was nothing short of torturous. I had met a girl at college, with whom I was hopelessly in love, and it had been my intention, to fall in love once, for ever, like a swan, or some pathetic thing like that. Well, not only did my job prospects not allow me to live independantly, but my relationship with this girl turned out being based on a lie. She had told me she loved me, and we had been engaged for two years when at the age of eighteen, I found out that she had been going behind my back with a fat bloke from Norfolk, for about six months.

I was pretty crushed. I had been living with this girl, and her folks (thats how strapped I was for cash, despite 75 hour weeks at a checkout/stock room at a well known frozen food store). Things get messy from there really. Suffice to say that now,after a period of living on the street, a couple of serious relationships later, plus a child that I have never met (because the mother is a psycho and her family are dangerous), I look back on my desire to settle down and be a better man than my father, and have to say that despite my best intentions, and huge efforts to make it right, and be the best damned human being I could, my personal life hasnt panned out anything like I hoped. Its a little sad I suppose, but on the other hand I didnt know anything like as much as I needed to about life, before I started living it, which is probably common to all persons who had as poor a male role model as I did growing up.

When I was sixteen, I wanted to live in my own home at some point, be able to maintain a life partner, have a family, travel the country, travel the world, and be there for the people who loved me, and whom I loved. Well, I will probably never own my own home, or any big ticket item. Hell, I couldnt afford a sofa right now, let alone real estate, and I can just about feed myself, and contribute to bills, and the closest I get to travel is the yearly rock festival I go to. As for love? Thats so many times harder than it ought to be, and a million times more painful. I guess you could say that both my global view of the future, and my personal one, were far too rooted in hope than in reality when I was young.

Sorry to ramble at length, TWICE in the same thread, but I thought it was worth mentioning all this, just to provide a bit of context.

No..the world is NOT how I thought it would be. I was 16 yrs/old in 91'...I was more optimistic..and it started off great..until 2001...then I started learn about how the world really works..and of course it's all downhill from there

reply to post by davethebear


In America I want the 70-80's to replay over and again. best times ever imho,

For the Uk, idk.. the 60-70's.. by looking at movies that time looked pretty sweet there?

Originally posted by HanzHenry
reply to post by davethebear

 

In America I want the 70-80's to replay over and again. best times ever imho,

For the Uk, idk.. the 60-70's.. by looking at movies that time looked pretty sweet there?

Mmm, like you, I did love the 70's, 80's and some of the 90's, but I think that that has something to do with being a great deal younger having adventures with your friends and feeling totally immortal. Unlike today when you are older and are no longer immortal and don't tend to take as many risks as what you did in your early years.....and yes, getting older is a bit of a bore, you just have to find different way in which to find enjoyment and fulfillment...