by James Wallace Harris, 6/21/23
How often have you heard an old person say they may look old on the outside but feel like a teenager on the inside? My wife’s uncle once told people on his 89th birthday that he felt 19 inside but something was terribly wrong with his body. And, how often have you wished you could go back to your younger self and give them advice hoping it would change who you were today?
Yesterday on YouTube I watched an excellent TED Talk about how we don’t know what our future self wants, even though we think we do. Journalist Shankar Vendantam gives several examples of people thinking one thing when they are young and something different when they got older. Vendantam makes a case that we’re constantly becoming new people, which is interesting when you think about how we always feel like we’re the same person.
If you could travel back in time to advise your younger self, they would have rejected it. They would have known better. We always think we know better.
I am reading The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, a novel first published in 1975. It’s not an easy novel to read because Brunner was trying to show what it would be like to live in the early 21st century by extrapolating what he knew from the early 1970s. The novel has been praised for being an early example of fiction about computer hacking and invented the term worm for a computer virus. It’s also about eluding oppressive computer surveillance.
The Shockwave Rider is very hard to read, and I’m having to go back and reread some sections several times. That’s because Brunner was intentionally trying to give his readers future shock. Do y’all remember the 1970 nonfiction book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler?
And this makes me wonder if we could take back examples of what it’s like to live in 2023 and give them to our younger selves, could they comprehend what their future selves might be like? I think this would be especially dramatic to people who grew up before the internet. I’m not sure people who grew up with the internet could imagine what life was like before it, or understand the concept of future shock.
Let’s imagine taking an iPad full of news videos, documentaries, magazines, and newspapers back to give to our younger self. How would they react? What would they make of 9/11 or January 6th? What would they make of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter? Or watching movies on HBO? How would they feel from watching a week’s worth of the NBC Nightly News? Or a few episodes of PBS Frontline? What would they think of mass shootings and climate change?
I know I would have been horrified. As a teen seeing the real future would be scarier than any horror film.
I’m sure most of us wish we could go back and warn ourselves, hoping we could set our younger selves on a different path so we’d end up living in a better future. Recently, The New York Times ran an opinion piece, “Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse.” It’s about the analysis of 235 surveys, covering 574,000 responses that ask people if they think our society is in moral decline. The current political climate suggests that people want to return to an early time when they believe people were nicer. The results of the research show that people always think that, no matter when they are asked, now, or in the past.
My initial reaction was that I agreed that people don’t change, and our perceptions of the past and future remain the same. But I thought the environment and civilization were getting worse, and would get much worse in the future. If you sub to the New York Times, please read the comments to the article linked above. Reactions are all over the place. They are fascinating and revealing, better than the article itself.
Personally, I feel people are more hateful now, but maybe that’s a delusion on my part. I have fond memories of the 1960s, but when I read about that decade in history books, those years were horrible. I think what hasn’t changed is my sense of happiness with life. If I ignore all the turmoil in the world, and just focus on what’s going on in my own life, I was happy then, and happy now.
They say knowledge is power, and that might be true. But a lot of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness come from knowing more about what’s going on around the world. When I first read Stand on Zanzibar in 1969, John Brunner’s 1968 novel about the 2010s, I was scared by the future he imagined. It was full of terrorism and political chaos. But in 1969, America was full of terrorism and political chaos. We forget that there were hundreds of anti-war bombings happening around the country, as well as endless riots and social unrest. And we also forget that statistically, crime was much worse back then.
I find reading The Shockwave Rider fascinating because Brunner invents several futuristic changes on each page that he expected might exist for us in the 21st century. For example, he predicted our lives would be full of gadgets that did all kinds of things for us. And we’ve had zillions of gadgets in our lives. What’s odd, is Brunner mostly predicted different kinds of gadgets that we don’t have. But the idea that lives would be cluttered with gizmos is right on. He also predicted all kinds of sexual and gender changes in society. His examples aren’t exactly the same as what we see today, but again, he was right about our time being more about sex and gender.
I think Brunner was predicting a future we’d want to avoid. That he knew that in the future we’d all wish we could go back and change our younger selves so we’d avoid the future we have. It’s weird to remember reading Brunner in 1969 and thinking about Future Shock in 1970, and then living in 2023 after living with future shock for decades.
Maybe the hate we see today is no more than the hate that existed in the past, but combined with future shock it feels like it’s so much more.
The upshot of all this is we wish things were different, but our minds stay the same. I’m 71 and feel mentally like I did at 17. I do wish my body was 17 again, however, I do feel different philosophically. I feel wiser. I would not exchange that for physical youth.
It’s 2023 but we wish it was the 1950s. But I remember in the 1950s we were so excited about living in the 21st century, and if I think about it, I remember there were a lot of things in the 1950s that were terrible and grotesque too.
Ram Das was right, all we can do is Be Here Now.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
The young people to whom I’m most exposed are in their early 30s. Two things that tend to stand out for me:
First, they’re mistrustful of power-holders in our society (for instance politicians in general, or the fossil fuel industry), which I can understand. When I compare it to my own youthful acceptance of the supposed benevolence of such entities, I think my ignorance helped me maintain some happiness that they don’t experience.
Second, they have a blasé attitude about the invasion of their privacy, particularly as regards their personal information: “you think it isn’t already out there?” I don’t know what to say to that; I get the impression either they feel powerless or they’re too distracted to even attempt to try to take precautions.
The world they occupy is massively different from when I was their age. I wouldn’t want to go backwards to the 60’s/70’s (my growing up years), but if I could wave a wand and make the internet go away I’d be tempted to do just that. You mention feeling that people are more hateful now. During the last 20 years, I’ve occupied enough internet spaces to sometimes feel that way too. But when I look back to a time when we weren’t regularly and repeatedly exposed to so much awfulness, I can reassure myself that what I see online is not the real world. The young people who grow up with “online” and “offline” so intertwined can’t reassure themselves that way. Imagine growing up “knowing” that’s just how it is!
It kind of rattles me whenever I have the thought that we’re among the last humans who are able to truly understand how different life was before the time when our immediate world expanded to include all the awfulness of everywhere, seemingly nonstop and all at once. My hope is that upcoming generations learn how to minimize the impact of the internet on their lives. Or maybe they’ll manage to tame the current chaos!
(ironic – following writers like yourself helps me to distract from the thoughts that I’m sharing here … )
You know, as much as I love the Internet, I might prefer life without it. I love the library aspect of the Internet, but I don’t like the virtual reality of it. I love being able to connect with people who share my interests, but it would be more fun if I hung out with them in person.
Before the Internet, I was into science fiction fandom and computer geekdom. Those were my social spheres. With fandom, you went to clubs, conventions, and shared ideas via fanzines. I used to be in a couple of APAs (amateur press associations) where 35 people would create a zine and send 35 copies to a central mailer four times a year. The central mailer would collate the zines, and then send a bundle of 35 different zines back to everyone. So I was friends with 34 people around the world. It functioned somewhat like the Internet but was much slower. It was good enough.
i can recollect reading a couple of excerpts fromFUTURE SHOCK in playboy, january 1971 or sometime that winter,anyway,around the same time that rolling stone had a review of it (the date of the issue and the name of the reviewer don’t come to mind,kind of embarassing,eh?); i can remember reading it circa 1973/1974, thinking that he had some interesting ideas. i remember rereading sometime in that stoned winter of 1977. my feeling was that some of it verged on prophecy. i havent read anything by john brunner with exception of a novel titled QUICKSAND, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s; it reminded me a bit of a novel by theodore sturgeon titled SOME OF YOUR BLOOD. as for meeting my twenty-one year old self, the best advice i could have come up with, by way of nelson algren, would have been: never sleep with a women who has more problems than you have. i recollect repeating that quote some years later when i was driving a cab in chicago, on a weeknight when finishing my paperwork in the garage. one of the other drivers said, ‘ sort of limits your options, doesn’t it?’ i reckon he had a point. as for trading in my so-called wisdom (o yeah, i’m a regular timothy leary) for my so-called youth and vitality (wayne gretzky never had anything on me,baby), i’m reminded of a graffito i saw on the wall of the mens room in a coffee house in chicago maybe forty years back: everything was beautiful and nothing hurt! the coffee house was named NO EXIT.
Ed, you’ve certainly lived a colorful life.
And so, you do read science fiction. Did you read science fiction back in high school? Did we ever talk about books back then?
Remember our teacher, Charlotte Travis? I used to talk to her after class and she’d tell me about a book, and I go read it. Did you do that too? I think one of them was A Catcher in the Rye. Another was The Stranger by Camus.
as i recollect, you turned me on to a story by michael moorcock titled BEHOLD THE MAN circa 1968; he later expanded it into a novel. i didn’t think it worked as well in that format. (although it’s intriuging to think what martin scorcese might have done with the screenplay i would have written, say with david warner as karl glogauer and barbara hershey as miranda.better yet, get terry gilliam to direct it.) other than that, not a hell of a lot of science fiction over the years; i was just getting into reading for the hell of it. rolling stone, saturday review (what the hell became of ellen sander?, ) , eye (anybody else remember stanley booth?},a novel about dogfighting in new england(PIT BULL by stephen geller), and a sort of sci-fi satire (GARBAGE WORLD by charles platt, which didn’t quite work, though a novel he wrote for the new york olympia press titled THE GAS is worth checking out if you can locate a copy.) a writer named phillip jose farmer did some interesting work for essex house out of north hollywood in that era: IMAGE OF THE BEAST, BLOWN, and A FEAST UNKNOWN. almost impossible to find nowadays, though they might still be in print in the U.K. (my copies are all from british publishers.) i can’t remember ever talking books with ms. travis,other than to wonder if henry gibsons poems would ever be collected and anthologized. only j.d. salinger i can recall is a story in an english textbook titled A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANA FISH. never read anything by albert camus. a canadian lady studying at northwestern, circa 1985, related an anecdote. jean-paul sartre told albert camus, ‘mon ami, your problem is that you’re too much of a fatalist.’ camus replied,’ so what choice have i got?’
Oh man, I remember when I read IMAGE OF THE BEAST and BLOWN. I just couldn’t believe anyone could image those things. What an imagination. I saw Farmer at a SF con one time in the early 1970s. He gave a speech about calculating how big King Kong’s package would have been.
I’ve collected three volumes of Charles Platts’ autobiography but haven’t read them. He now writes books about maker electronics.
Good quite on Camus. I wish I could remember quotes, but never can.
some forlorn further thoughts on my youthful reading. i recollect reading an article by norman spinrad in which he labeled his work as speculative fiction; this would have been some time in the mid 1970s in wichita , a couple,three years after i’d read THE IRON DREAM, probably the same summer i read BUG JACK BARRON, some years before i read THE VOID CAPTAINS TALE (his best novel, in my humble opinion.) i picked up on william gibson around the time THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE was published, when he made an appearance at elliott bay books in Seattle (may of 1991, week of my fortieth birthday, if memory serves) where he claimed that his collaboration with his cowriter had been by fax,to minimize the personal element; apparently they we re collaborators rather than comrades. it would have been interesting to have been the editor on that manuscript (was that assigned to jack womack? if gibson ever does another book tour, i know what i’ll ask.)i think my interest was less in science fiction than in the alternate history/paralell universe trip. check out THE PESHAWAR LANCERS by s.m. stirling or TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK by steve erickson, give you some idea of where my head is at, if you get my meaning if you catch my drift. drifting further yet, look for a story titled REVOLUTION BLUES by andrew hultkrans which is essentially a standup bit built around the setup: ‘ so neil young and charley manson drive over to laurel canyon to call on arthur lee…consequences.” and if you’re still with me, i appreciate you more than you realize.
the line should read never sleep with a woman who has more problems/women who have more problems/ than you have. apologies to nelson algren; i can’t remember if the original is singular or plural.
I’m a big John Brunner fan and have read most of his novels. One of my favorite Brunner novels is THE JAGGED ORBIT which predicted–correctly–that the future we’re living in right now would be full of violence. Plenty of SF writers extrapolate current trends, but Brunner’s books like STAND ON ZANZIBAR and SHOCKWAVE RIDER expand on tendencies and 40 years later come pretty close to the current situtation.