Memories from the Year 2030 is a collection of fictional letters, memos and visual artifacts created by a group of futurists, speculative designers, authors and artists. See the entire series here.
14 August 2030. Today my Father would have turned 93. It is almost 20 years since he died. For a while, after he passed I could draw in detail a world where he lived into his 90’s like his father before him. A world where he got to see his oldest grandson marry, a world where he held his only grand-daughter in his arms. My life was turned upside down by his death, at some point it became impossible to story the parallel universe where I still live in Brooklyn, I am still married, I am still 2010 me. I remember walking up the brownstone stairs, I remember telling my sons he had died and I remember H trying to hold back a smirk. He gently assured me I needn’t cry. H’s hand reached out to hold mine, “Mom when I die in a game I don’t cry...I just press restart.” He was 5, his game was Minecraft.
I also cannot bring into focus an alternate version of me that was not shaken up and spun around three times a decade ago. A before and after 2020 me. That year the boys’ grandma died, my mother. I was alone when I got the call from Aotearoa. Not “no one else home” alone, I was “in quarantine” alone. The night she died there was no plane to catch, no bag to pack, no borders open. Still. I held off FaceTiming my children as I did not know how to perform the script of loss without the grounding assurance of touch. They were only minutes away at their Dad’s, but the government had declared I could not hug them for another 12 days. That time H no longer believed I could simply start over and his hand could not reach out to tell me everything would be okay. He did not know how to offer compassion through a screen any more than I did. He wanted to get back to his game. He was a teenager, his game was Call of Duty.
Spin number two was the months of extended isolation. My travel quarantine rolled into months of global lockdowns and social distancing. My personal mourning played out to a soundtrack of global, collective grief. When my Dad died it seemed so wrong that the world kept spinning, news kept happening, people kept working. In 2020 when my Mum died the world stood still in solidarity. Every newspaper, podcast or friend reminded me we were grieving together.
The darkness of days mourning alone had me searching to understand the profound anger and sense of loss. On a good day, I was one of the lucky ones. My mother had lived through seven different primary cancers, a heart attack and hospital-acquired pneumonia (twice). My son believed she should be in the Guinness Book of Records for beating cancer so many times and my brother always joked that if she lived in the US her stories and scars would make for a New York Times bestseller. We are a family who had four decades to live with the idea of our mother’s mortality and with this the blessing of many days of celebrating her life and quiet hours of saying goodbye. I was grateful my mother’s suffering was over. My grief was channelled into disbelief that in a world divided into essential and non-essential services receiving a “we will get through this together” hug was not recognised as vital.
By the time the country had joined me in lockdown, I was armed with the neuroscience behind the therapeutic hug, the evidence in support of touch deprivation and a deeply felt knowing that we are social beings. The researcher in me became obsessed with how we might design new rituals for how to hold each other up even as we stand 6-feet apart.
I do not doubt that the dedication I brought to the Hold it Together project came from a place of self-preservation, came from knowing that spin number three was yet to come. My younger brother, in lockdown, an ocean way, had terminal cancer. None of us knew when the borders might re-open, whether compassionate visits would be allowed, when the months left would become weeks. All we knew was that Corona times had mocked his bucket list.
The year 2020 will, for me, always be defined by love, loneliness and loss. The last movie I saw in a cinema or the last time I shook a stranger’s hand — these are losses that do not register a decade later. Waking my sons at 3 am to gogglebox other fans live-streaming a world premiere unceremoniously slipped into becoming the new normal. The universal yet intimate connection of watching new releases together alone nostalgically reminded me of the connection I felt when my Dad and I watched northern hemisphere sports in the small hours. Ditching the patriarchal handshake was liberating. Giving my bubble loved ones a socially-sanctioned long therapeutic embrace was a welcome bonus. The political and systemic shifts seeded in 2020 felt different once they leapt from newspaper headlines to become woven into the social fabric of our everyday. For me, what was transformative about 2020 was that the elemental, enduring essence of the human condition was pulled into focus.
Like a child’s game, 2020 spun me around three times with a blindfold on. I stumbled into 2021 unsure which direction I was facing. We all stepped out of Corona times forever changed by the experience of prolonged isolation. As people shifted to choose intimate connection over distal social networks, the desire for tight friendships replaced our quest for followers, and a complicated vocabulary for emotions came to prevail over the quick hit of a “like.”
A decade later I now see that when the blindfold came off I was facing in the right direction, after all. I was headed exactly where I needed to be going. My way of being and my way of designing were changed by this turn toward the relational. I no longer needed to hide my practice behind words like learning, interactions, and resilience. It became possible to own, in plain sight, that in work and life I was designing for emotions, for connection, for transformation. Once the blindfold fell, the way forward was clear. The paradox of the ’20s was how a decade born into paralysis and uncertainty could broadcast with fierce conviction the answer to the question “where to from here?”
Lisa Grocott is a design researcher who is currently the Director of WonderLab and leads The Future of Work & Learning research program in the Emerging Technologies Lab at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.