Good morning. Take a moment to wipe the gunk from your eyes. Thirty-five years is a long time to lie in cryogenic sleep. I’ll update you on what you’ve missed. 

Forget about flying cars, domed cities and contact with extra-terrestrials. None of that happened. Here’s what you need to know: you’ll spend ninety percent of your waking life retrieving and resetting passwords. 

You’ll use a computer for everything you want to do and you need a username and password for each thing. Don’t make them predictable, like anything about your life, any combination of numbers, or any word in the dictionary. The best choice is a long jumble of numbers, letters and special characters that no human being could ever remember, ever. 

Your computer will offer to commit these to memory for you, but that lays out the welcome mat for identity thieves to nab every cent you’ll ever own, so don’t do that. Keep a list in your computer instead. Identity thieves will find that too, but never mind. 

When you want to know if your paycheck came through, or read an article, or see how much a concert ticket costs, your password won’t work. Or maybe you inputted the wrong username. Or maybe you mistyped something. Try a few times to assure yourself it isn’t happening. Cuz it ain’t. Now you’ll need to reset everything.

To do that, simply identify which squares features a truck, decipher a combination of letters and numbers designed by a demented elf overdosing on edibles, and promise you’re not a robot. Somehow you’ll make a mistake with one of these, and go through the whole rigmarole again. And again. Your stress will spike to Donald Duck levels.

Now call the help-line. A computer will ask you to speak, and won’t understand you. You’ll repeat yourself louder and more angrily, and it still won’t be able to decode your clear, intelligible speech in the only fucking language you’ve ever fucking spoken. You’ll yell at it to connect you with a fucking human being already, and then listen to asinine music and chipper announcements you do not give a single solitary shit about for an indefinite amount of time. You’ll be asked if you’d like to complete a survey about how the company’s doing. When you answer no, the computer will sound vaguely hurt. 

Eventually you’ll get help from an actual person, reset your password, sign in and swear to fucking Christ that you’re going to come up with a system to make sure this never fucking happens again.

As you finally do the simple fucking thing that should only have taken thirty fucking seconds and now it’s forty-five fucking minutes later, you’ll forget to follow through on creating that new better system. 

Or maybe you actually will do it. If so, congratulations. 

But next time it still won’t work. 

So you’ll go through all of this again. Every time. For everything you want to fucking do, no matter how simple, no matter how unimportant. Forever. Until the system changes, probably for the worse. 

And every three months, change your passwords for everything, just because.

This is the future. Welcome to it. 

Also — the world’s on fire and everyone hates each other.