Dystopian outlook

In the future, money will cease to exist. We can now pay with our laptops, on our phones and with contactless cards; there will be no need for physical currency, because technology will take over. Efficiency always was our weakness. But the transferring of money is still founded on the concept of it; when we lay our plastic bank cards against the card machine as payment, we still imagine those coins exchanging hands, and think of it as a trade of physical money.

Soon it seems we will be living on concepts and relying on them. Reality will be no more, but we will still have the concept of reality: imagination and artificial creation. The world will morph into one big game of pretend, with an electronic barrier between us and life. We'll devote ourselves to robots instead of real, beating hearts, machines over freshly mown grass. iPads replace books, apps replace games, technology replaces life. Only in our minds as an ideal will the world survive; only in these warped caricatures will the living, breathing world continue on. Society will be so fake it will no longer recognise itself in the mirror, but will step back and say "damn Daniel, back at it again with the pollution, the Botox, and the online dating."

Will anything be real? Perhaps the sense of loss will be real. Perhaps the increase in people with severe mental health problems and the loneliness will be real. Perhaps all else will be fake apart from that empty, aching feeling inside which screams that this is wrong, that this goes against our nature. I can't go five minutes without having my phone in my hand, checking it even when I'm not expecting any news, aimlessly scrolling through it subconsciously. I hate this so much I want to take a sledgehammer to it and smash it up, until the glass and the metal are little more than dust in my hands. But I can't. Why not? Because the entire fucking world is the same, contaminated and obsessed, like we've been sucked into a dark hole and we can't see to get ourselves out. Like the lotus eaters we barely even know we are having our lives wasted away, our energy drained out of us; we are oblivious to our own destruction. Humans are so strong, so adaptable and incredible; nothing can destroy us because we dominate the earth. 

But of course, we will destroy ourselves. When every human is dead and God walks among our technology ridden corpses he will mutter "my god, whose idea was it to give them free will."