I’ve had to limit my news consumption by a LOT this last couple of years. I stay informed, but just enough for what I need to be aware of and act on and, perhaps, understand what the meme-of-the-day on Bluesky is all about. One such irreverent source that does a pretty good job of summarizing the national political chaos is “What The Fuck Just Happened Today?” a daily newsletter that attempts to distill the day into one VERY long sentence, or at least a few short bites with ample links to the bigger news sites.
The author has been asking readers to compose a letter to someone in 2040, collecting them as a sort of time capsule of the moment of what living in 2026 is like. In fact, today, as of this writing, is the last day for it. I sat down to compose mine, but only realized the 1000 character limit after I’d surpassed it by a factor of three. Oops.
So, I submitted a couple of shortened versions, but I thought I’d post the full thing here since, I swear, I was going for a single coherent point in all this.
Dear 2040,
I’m thinking of my young niblings as I write this in 2026. I think of what was going on in the world when I was that age in the 1980s, how I had no idea what was going on outside of my world of toys and playtime. Yet, what was happening then in the country (like the Reagan administration) and in the world (the crumbling of the Soviet Union) had a profound impact on shaping the world I see today.
So, I imagine that if you are reading this at an age where the 2020s are a haze of childhood fun, you might be interested in hearing how what you lived through has impacted where you are today.
Of course, I don’t KNOW what’s going on in 2040 as you are reading this. But, just as the fall of authoritarian communism in the Soviet Union gave way to the Russian oligarchy headed by Putin that threatens world stability today, it’ll matter. I didn’t know just how badly Reaganomics began the gutting of the middle class until it was too late and I was an adult, still forming my ideas about the world. I only learned all too recently to draw the lines from the political rise of the conservative movement in the 1980s to the gulf of income inequality we see today.
Today, in 2026, we’re seeing a rise in the left, a growing acceptance of ideas like democratic socialism that were never given a chance amidst the threats of authoritarian socialism and communism in the time of my parents. We’re seeing a hope and a connection to an earlier time in the 20th century when the things we take for granted, like Social Security for the retired and disabled, were first brought about in a spirit of cooperation contrasted with the rugged individualism of strict laissez-faire capitalism. The backlash to these ideas has been brutal, and it’s taken my whole life until this point to unfold. But as we see the wave of Democrats winning in the 2026 elections, and the growing percentage of them that are truly progressive, I have hope that we’re on that path.
I grew up in a world that tried to act like minor gains against sexism and racism were seen as the end of those scourges, when today we know that those forces are as strong as ever. I grew up in a world where being not-heterosexual was a scandal, and most of us had no language for describing the glorious complexity of gender. There are those of us who have come to know ourselves better as queer folks as acceptance has spread, and we know defiance as we live through a fierce backlash against it. I’m watching a loved one go through a gender transition, and I wish they could experience that without the pain of rejection and the fear of violence. We persevere so that when you are reading this, I hope, these struggles seem foreign to you, that complexity of gender is as acceptable to you as a kid with two moms is to many kids today.
For the last two years, during this second Trump administration, I feared that the world of 2040 might be a post-apocalyptic hellscape. However, an apocalypse need not be the horror we imagine in fiction. In The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that people around the world, including and especially the Indigenous peoples that remain the planet’s most steadfast defenders, have had their own apocalypses, the devastations of their worlds. The descendants of those who survived are leading the charge in protecting the Earth from ourselves. We are going through an apocalypse, the end of the old order and the rebirth, I hope, of something new, a more just and equitable world.
2040 isn’t all that far off in a sense. I hope I’ll still be alive, in my mid-to-late 50s, doing what I can to help make that world possible. I hope to see you there as we build something beautiful together.
Featured image: CC0 anncapictures via pixabay
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