This World is Not New

Day 4,000, 05:44 • Published in Greece Greece • by Asterios C

The New World is getting old. Old people are notoriously grumpy. So I expect the bickering to crank up even more and suffocatingly overflow the channels. Nothing will ever be as good as their glorious days of youth. Bit by bit, everything will shrivel down to become more of a painful shadow of its former grandeur. A glazed stare will settle over eyes tired of reading the same kind of posts by the same people. They’ll keep posting their own crop of medals though, because why not?

A profound feeling of living through Groundhog Day will emanate from the chasms of funhaving past, as each next day will play out identical to the one before. No one will go out of their way to try different game styles, since you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. They’ll just sigh in memory of back when there were true captains of industry, politics mattered and war was honorable. International affairs will stagnate into sisyphean repetition, as communities dwindle down to monolithic personas that follow the exact same agenda, photocopied and distributed under stern instruction by habit and convenience.

But there is another annoying thing old people are known for: they stubbornly refuse to die. Whatever their current predicament, they cling to dear life by any means possible. I’m utterly convinced there’ll be plenty of old-timers around for the 5.000 Days milestone as well. And they’ll probably be the ones that kept coming back throughout the years. Genuine electronic Methuselahs. The ones that were hooked on early or the ones that paid an actual fortune to see their accounts thrive. They’ll grind and grind and bot whatever can be botted. Then they’ll grind some more with nerve-racking precision that only long accumulated experience can muster.

One thousand more days can certainly bring a whole lot of new thrills and excitement. But we can't have that. That would subvert our routines. And routines are important. We cannot do anything that would mess with them. It’s almost sacrilegious if we do. So we don’t. We simply keep on clicking as long as there are buttons to click. We let our veteran reflections guide us onwards. This is no ominous forecast. This is diehard optimism. No New World can stay new forever. We’ve figured that out by know. The thing is, New Worlds are fun and all, but time-worn Worlds is where we make our stand.



Not the heros we need, but the heros we'll become anyway

This article is written as a submission to the Day 4000 Media Contest, Category 1: ‘Best Forecast for Next 1000 Days’ by the Plato Foundation