#(and has to import enough rice to feed itself supposed to survive in this future without -)

[mitzirockerextendeduniverse]

...

is there room for me, in this cozy cottagecore future?

i don't have a garden. that's not because i don't have an opportunity, it's because it's not my kind of thing. i don't have grandkids, either. i live on my own, in a small house full of old books and at least one thing what plays video games. there's a community outside, for when i have the energy, but i need my own space, quiet, unbothered, to recharge. i go for walks, i write

what am i wearing? up here, where i grew up, they make clothes from wool, it's way too cold to grow clothing plants. but wool itches against my skin, it makes me break out in rashes, and it gets up my throat and makes my breath come out wheezing. that's likely to be a problem either way, though, with how terrible my respiratory system is. are there asthma inhalers in your future? are there annual flu shots?

what do i eat? pecans, eggs, milk, i have so many allergies i have to keep in mind when i choose my food, narrowing down your sprawling feast to a few tiny dishes. you look at your locally grown produce and marvel at its freshness, but i stare at the nuts and beans on offer and remember the tropical fruits of my youth. chicken in bread again tonight, it seems

while you grow milkweed in your garden, am i fiddling with a nest of internet cables, begging them out loud to just connect, just for an hour? or does the internet even exist? am i forever wistfully remembering the friends i made when i was young, the fandom community that was the first place i ever belonged, the stories that meant so much to me that no one around me ever understands? i used to study a language spoken on the other end of eurasia, it was the one 'useful' skill i've ever really had. i used to be able to brush up against a world so like and unlike my own, and dreamed of writing translation bridges to bring together people from here and there. i'll never touch that world again, now

perhaps i've made friends in my local community, but i've never been good at that. i can't talk for an hour about nothing, i can't do small talk or stay in a conversation that's stressing me out or even look people in the eye for more than a second. and what would i talk to them about? either i have nothing to say on a topic or i can and will go on for hours, i nod and fiddle with a piece of grass while they talk about village life and talk so much my jaw begins to ache when they bring up books, or history, or the stories in my mind. i type easier than i talk, it's harder to get lost in spiralling tangents when i can edit my words before i show them to the world, harder to seem rude or inattentive around someone who doesn't know me when it's acceptable to reply to people as and when you feel up to it. in real life, i stumble over my words, and i fail to explain myself, and i talk too loud and too fast in an unidentifiable accent. not that many people have the patience

and what happens when the crops fail, or a disease spreads through town, or the flood barriers fail? will my community accept that sometimes these things happen and do what they can to ameliorate the problem, or will some of them do what people around here have done for centuries long after they should have known better, and blame the old, reclusive, uncanny, isolated jew?

all of which is assuming i even survive to the time when you're showing your grandchildren pictures of lawns without tomatoes. when i was young, every month i would go to the chemist and they would give me little cardboard packets of antidepressants and antipsychotics and antihistamines, a chemical cocktail my psychiatrist and i had put together through trial and error over the course of years. those medicines stopped my brain from grinding itself to death in the gears of tangled unshakeable terrifying thoughts and gave me the strength to get outside of my own head and make a mark on the world. i never asked what was in the packets, or how it was made. i never thought i'd need to know. but now - at best, i think, i'm scouring markets for expensive drugs i used to get free and easily from the government and the global supply chain. at worst... i barely got through a decade without my meds, once puberty and secondary school kicked my mental health issues into overdrive. i don't think i'd survive five more

don't get me wrong, i'm not writing this to reddit-atheist debunk your dream. i'm writing this because i read your post about the crack in the darkness through which you see a tree, and i...

seven billion people, in every corner of the planet. unless we totally break the biosphere (and i don't think that's likely, we're not half as powerful as we think), even if things get apocalyptically bad... even if not all of us survive this, mathematically, someone, somewhere, will. i think we owe that person something. people my age talk a lot about how we have no future and we're all going to die, but i've never been able to believe that. maybe it's privilege, maybe it's the kind of deliberately unthinking optimism i developed back when my fears would pile up so heavy the back of my neck would burn, but... our parents grew up thinking they'd die in a hail of nuclear fire, some of our ancestors grew up thinking the last judgment would come any minute and there was no need to think about the world around us. which is partially what got us into this mess in the first place. no one's ever made bank on the end of the world, and i'm not arrogant enough to think our generation is magically right when all our predecessors have been wrong. there will be a tomorrow. we need to prepare for it

i'd been thinking like that for a few years, already, when i read your post. but it was the first time i'd seen thoughts like that reflected back at me from someone i could see as a peer. a tumblr user, just like me, who can see a bright future ahead. i'm not into bugs or plants or north american environmental management, but i did read your blog, for hope

but then i read this, and... i'm probably projecting. i often do that, when i haven't taken my meds, get lost in rhetorical wildernesses with barely any relation to what anyone's actually said. still i can't shake the fear that the future you described, that sounded so boundless, is actually tight and constrained, horizons that barely stretch to the nearest town, where you are trapped in a community is friendly and supportive as long as you are exactly what they want you to be

it's almost certainly not what you meant. but modernity saved my life, literally and metaphorically, several times over, and the outlines of the idyllic future you sketch have taken on a shake alarmingly similar to the past i, a mentally ill autistic weirdo who grew up an outcast, child of poor english farmers who scraped the bottom of the butter tin to get every last drop and eastern european city jews who only just escaped to america before the sword of damocles finally fell, fought so hard to escape

In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"

We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines