The future is so much more housebound than we expected

Americans of the future were supposed to race around everywhere. What happened?

A future house.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Vintage Images / Alamy Stock Photo, MicrovOne/iStock)

Futurists of a century ago were distinctly optimistic. They envisioned a 21st century of convenience, prosperity, and speed. Everything would get bigger and shinier and faster. Flying cars, jetpacks, weekend jaunts to the moon and back, and highways — highways everywhere! Highways in the air; highways under the sea; highways on roofs; roads layered like a lasagna, so you could have pedestrians on top of slow cars on top of fast cars on top of trains.

The details differed, but the trend is evidence of an assumption that people of the future would always be out and about. Why we'd need to race around our cities at such a frenetic pace is not clear — many predictions from the same era forecast an all-robot economy in which work is no longer necessary or at least greatly reduced — but racing we would be. Maybe it's just shopping? I don't know. Whatever the reason, omnipresent highways would let us do it in record time.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.