As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.
David Graeber | The Baffler. I get the point, but when I was a young person I loved reading, listening to music, and watching sports on TV. So if you had offered me a future in which (a) I could fly around with a jetpack and there were space stations on Mars or (b) I had the ability watch any imaginable sporting event on live TV and to go in sixty seconds from being interested in a book or a song to reading that book or listening to that song … well, the space stations and jetpacks wouldn’t have had a chance.