2050: We and Our Shadows

Back in my day at the turn of the 21st century, when a grownup said, ‘back in my day,’ us kids ran the other way.

Tales from the 1900’s were always followed by a story about walking up hills both ways, accompanied by arduous accounts about doing so in bare feet during blizzards as they carved tunnels while carrying sacks too heavy for the doctors they didn’t have to fix the broken backs they’d arrive with if they were lucky enough to get to the wherever they were going to uphill both ways, in the first place.

Nowadays, in 2050, the kids can’t get enough of my own ‘back in the day’ stories.

They want to know everything about what it was like before we were all microchipped.

“What was it like before our lives were charted in public records of every mental and biological system change happening inside us; and every interaction with every other chipped being outside us, every second, recorded chip to chip to The Master Chip, in real time?” They would ask.

Is what all the kids wanted to know.

My job as one of the only certified PhD, non-BOT professors left alive and actively professing at a university, was to give them just that.

I’m one of the fortunate souls that separated myself from the Ai bots that took over our professional landscape in 2025 – sending everyone scrambling to carve a career entirely different than the entire course of previous education, career advancement, debt amassment and dedication to ‘work’ they spent years sacrificing their human connection and purpose on this planet, for.

In 2050, there are no such things as the college degrees my generation spent chasing and held hostage to, while crawling out of debt for, that are no longer practical.

In 2025, robots started performing spinal surgeries…by 2026 they were teaching the procedure to the most renowned robots in the world…and by 2030, human doctors that had spent a lifetime honing their skills to be expert in their field, we’re no more equipped than the nurses who woke up the patients and debriefed the families on the medical procedure with a human hug; to be doing any procedure.

Medical malpractice suits had certainly diminished. Lawsuits – lawyers, in general…one of many practices thriving in the early 2000’s, were forced to adopt a seismic shift from its system of origin to current real-world applications of human vs BOT situations.

With our microchips charting everything from DMV records of self-driving transportation vs human experience; to human contact in passing with any other human every time humans pass; to credit scores and medical records as transparent and available as the very medicine needed for daily living publicly available if the right people scan you. Criminal records were as easily publicly available scan to scan with family as it was a fellow public transportation rider. Total job and education history was open to anyone anywhere - easily scannable but no longer ‘fudgeable on things like LinkedIn and resumes, nor are things like that needed. Familial descent history and troublesome or noteworthy genetic ties were readily available to the right folks who wanted to know.

In 2050 anonymity was a challenge. The challenge. People wanted to stop looking alike or being classified as one. They wanted to have freedom to create secrets and choose who they trusted to keep them. Again.

The silver lining to the loss of freedom was overall acceptance of societal differences -- with the help of science explaining what we once judged as choice.

Like ‘being gay’ or ‘being suicidal’ whether one acted on those 'urges or not,' ever, were established firmly as ones biologically established mechanisms within. They had traced it to the genes.

Today those weren't choices and there was no question.

***

I always keep an entire class open for this topic...the 'gay gene' one. My students flip, here.

No one would ever consider using ‘L-B-G-Q-T+-Etc-Etc!’ these days, unless they wanted to be publicly shamed into hopeful hiding.

Or unless they were the artists - the only ones that used that acronym…kind of like the relationship Jay Z & Eminem & the rappers of the early 2000s had with the ‘N’ word.

In 2050 my precious, innocent little grandkids delight and horrify me with the otherwise unheard from dark sides of their always active imaginations by spending hours fantasizing about the crimes they would commit if they could go untracked and without microchips like we did in 1999.

They think that’s why Prince made the song because they would party too, unchipped.

They would speed their cars and ride their bikes past middle school crushes without their chip reporting stalking or reckless driving and they would run in the candy store and grab all the gummy bears and make a break for it from police men who only had legs and police cars and guns back then (HaHaHa) - and run away before their chips were tagged in the store-lock-sensor devise alerting real time overhead drones to pluck ‘em and chuck ‘em to law enforcement right away. And Ohhh what they would do if they could kill someone like their mean gym teacher and only be tracked by DNA, not sensors at every stop…throw a pair of gloves on like OJ Simpson and what a time to be alive (HaHaHa)!

The little ones and the college kids were different in 2050, except for one thing: When you mentioned the 2020 Covid Pandemic – they are about as phased as us kids were in 1999 when we learned about the Bubonic Plague or the Polio Vaccine…since the reality was so far from us.

The little generations associate 2020 with Darwinism and move on.

The college kids can't get enough of hearing about times when mental health help was not as accessible, or mandatory.

My students want to know what it was like when people treated suicide like the Salem witch trials. If you were gone, you were crazy. If you thought about going, you might as well go, because you’re crazy. If the only solution you knew you had was to leave your life – you’d been crazy and just finally realized.

When I mention we didn’t have the ‘been here before’ VS ‘first time empath’ theory…jaws drop.

When I remind them, modern science has brought about the biological components of suicide…being no different than in 2035, when they specifically mapped the gay and cross between gender genes…and how that was unaccepted for most of my life, that people that were (GASP: LBGQT+ Etc GASP) were thought to be so, by choice. And... ridiculed?

Thats when the situation that suicide used to be the same, resonates most with them.

The comparison to the biological component of being gay – and how in 2000, the preferences in a mate was classified...like suicide thoughts and the people who had them, were classified in 2025. Still.

***

Today was the first class of fall semester, 2050. I always started with my own totally different suffering in silence tale of life in 2000. Not really in the neurodivergent or (GASP LBGQT+ Etc Etc GASP) just trying to survive in 'just trying to get the get mental health help in an ERA that mental health help wasn't available, Era...'

I tell about me when I was them. Back then I was in their seats, exactly. Today I will tell them way back when I was a freshman… 50 years ago. I say something like:

"My mom died the moment I got to college, 4 hours away from anyone I’d yet met in my new life. 4 hours away from everyone I knew in my old life. Shock and denial decided for me, that in order to survive this – I must not call attention to this. My body revolted the more I ran away from facing my grief. The lack of mental health help anywhere, helped me hide.

When I couldn’t eat or sleep or run fast those first months, doctors on the Division 1 Women’s Track Team I’d chosen my college specifically for, prescribed an ‘anti-depressant’ medicine. No one had ever heard of antidepressants … and I was too embarrassed to explain to anyone why I needed to be ‘anti-depressed’ – surrounded by 24,000 egocentric college kids.

Even though I could not eat, the medicine made me gain weight. I was publicly weighed in track practice and shamed into an eating disorder. While I’d never felt suicidal depression, I suddenly could only think about suicide. I was forced to quit the track team. My identity, for the past 4 years.

The futile search for boys wanting a committed relationship on a college campus was for all the other girls, like my own for a therapist or counselor in the middle of Michigan on the middle of campus in the middle of 2000.

The only access to mental health help was via committing yourself to the emergency psyche ward – or $200 out of pocket and a special referral from people only fancy people could access, since psychiatrists and counselors didn’t accept health insurance. The psyche ward was an automatic ruin-your-life-with-one-decision-just-trying-to-save-your-life sentence.

And no one was there to help me know stopping the medicine that had ruined everything else would send me into such a chemically imbalanced spiral… emergency rooms and dropping out of college would seem like more viable options than just telling one person what was physically happening inside me. Addictions and fractured relationships fill the void instead. And the only thing that opened most people's eyes…were losing someone, to the mental health epidemic, first. It was for me, that kind of moment, that took me opening up..."

The students would always listen intently. As if I were telling the barbaric stories of soldiers storming Normandy.

After my story, someone would always shout out--usually a few of the students, would cry:

“Wait! Why didn’t they just help you address the grief through therapy, first?”

“Great point,” I love to add…having been waiting/anticipating the moment. Then I mention how every disorder from ADHD to situational PTSD Anxiety to Schizophrenia…were also, treated like this.

Not just repressed grief was shameful.

“And not even talk therapy was mandatory yet?” the room sings in chorus.

“Not even talk therapy!” I sing back. Grateful it's not the olden days anymore.

Reminding them we all wanted to be the same back then – not stand out as different, like today. Which makes them laugh.

“What made you finally talk about it in 2025?” Asks a student, referencing a detail in my 2025 memoir that helped me secure my human credibility in this role, all these years later.

“My friend Kelsey, I didn’t know was struggling, died by his own hands in 2024. There still wasn't much help in 2025.”

Everyone shutters.

But not in the way they did in 2025 when they did so out of shame and horror. They shutter because they can’t imagine there not being daily acceptance and support for mental health.

I was grateful to be telling the untold stories of the plight of the butterflies, and especially grateful to be living my dream, at 70, of working for 100% complete want and zero percent need. Which is why I was still working full time at 70 and happier than ever. (Prettier too. Obviously).

Everyone was happier in 2050 because mental health was as core a focus in society as maintaining an updated passport used to be. As mandatory as 5th grade immunization booster shots used to be. And people were free to realize what themselves were meant to be. Free of judgement.

***.

My grandkids called me a lifeguard. I laugh because they’d never believe humans used to be water lifeguards, themselves. Channeling the Baywatch days.

In 2050, the chips of every kid in pool or ocean or water under patrol, set off alarm immediately when someone has irregular breathing. The overhead drone bots available with the quickness to immediately swoop in and fly the kid over to pool deck for CPR or what not...way faster than Mitch Handcock could blow his whistle, and Pamela Anderson could adjust her own flotation devices and they both could dive into the Pacific in sync.

What I really do, is teach the empaths and the been here’s what its like to be each other, reminding all that we've all been each other or will be each other, next time.

It's important to embrace the difference between people that have been here in another lifetime and aren't as sensitive to this one- And people that are here for the first time, this time.

People that are here for the first time - empaths we used to call them, joking. Sensitive souls we used to say.

Once we traced the gene to those that are afflicted with thoughts of suicide...those that succumb… regardless of the series of problems leading to addictions...leading to the act itself…

...once we found they are biologically, wired differently. Once the BOTs confirmed they are the sensitive souls because its their first time here...and that we have all be sensitive souls. We have all been the empaths here, for the first time..

We treat the first timers, the empaths, we treat them differently. Because we know, we all used to be one.

And after this time, it will never, again, be a joke about sensitive souls and those who have been here to have -lived a lifetime.

Our job, as those that have been here before...is to make sure the empaths make it through this time, to see with clarity, next time.

***

That’s the summary of the class I teach in 2050.

I’m on my way out to class as I wait to hug my grandkids in passing. They are out walking the dog and the dog-walking-robot whose only purpose is to walk the dog is escorting them all and it's unclear who is walking whom which makes me smile. I walk out to greet them.

“Grandma how come you still go to work even though you don’t need a job and you don’t need the money anymore?” One asks.

"Cause' she is a lifeguard and the empaths need her,” says another.

“No, the ones that have been here before, need her,” says the third.

I smiled knowing our obvious empath had help and smiled in reassurance at the other two who had clearly been here, before, and needed none.

No. It's because your grandma is one of the lucky empaths whose life was saved from suicide back in the day. Before we had help...back when we lost too many butterflies by not lifting the weight of suicidal shame, sooner than science proved it...

I thought.