2036
A dispatch from a decade into the future.
Hi friends,
In recent days, nostalgia for 2016 has swept Instagram, the one social media space I still tolerate…and even enjoy. There, we’re all sharing photos from The Year Before Everything Changed. Oh, 2016, bless your heart, you sweet, sweet thing. You had no idea.
As a storyteller, I often think about before/after moments, the split seconds when everything changes. The wild night out/the repercussions the morning after. The moment before diagnosis/the moment after reading the lab report. The moment before impact/the aftermath of the crash. Sometimes we know these inciting events when they happen; sometimes they’re obvious only in retrospect.
This trend is likely driven mostly by the youngest Millennials facing 30, but its cross-generational resonance transcends nostalgia. We’re all trying to pinpoint the origins of what we’re seeing on the streets of Minneapolis right now, and a decade gives us the necessary perspective.
This week, I took a spin through my own 2016 photo memories. That was the year I upgraded to a new iPhone with vastly more storage and a bigger data plan, allowing profligate picture-taking and posting. There are so many photos, so many posts, all so innocent of what was to come. We were younger, sure, and cell phone cameras were getting pretty good, but not as high resolution as they are now. Visually, 2016 looks nothing like 2026, even accounting for a decade of aging into my midlife face.
It was quite a year, 2016. It was the last full year I had a full-time job. I had two jobs, actually: a busy and interesting—but often frustrating—job as a journalist covering climate change, and a fulfilling but not-very-ambitious side gig as a yoga teacher.
In 2016, I said goodbye to my 16-year-old dog, the steadfast companion of my adulthood. I traveled to Paris, Istanbul, Dubai and South Africa, plus all over the U.S. for work, places as disparate as North Dakota, San Francisco, coastal North Carolina and upstate New York.
There’s a selfie of me doing a handstand the morning of the presidential election. Another of my tired, sad face the morning after, on my walk to work. My 2016 “I voted” sticker, yikes. Looking back at these photos, I recall the shock in my sister’s voice from South Africa, seven hours ahead of us on the East Coast, waking up to the news just as I was trying to catch a few hours of sleep before work. I wrote something in this very newsletter about how we’d need to “hug harder,” which, with the benefit of hindsight, was important but not nearly enough.
It’s okay, it was our before/after moment.
In 2016, I could have gestured at what I wanted from the next decade, both personally and professionally and for the country and the planet. But not with the clarity I possess now in 2026, with the clarity I suspect we all possess. Back in 2016, I memorized “Our Real Work,” a short Wendell Berry poem popular in the days after the election. I still recite lines to myself all the time: The mind that is not baffled is not employed/the impeded stream is the one that sings.
It’s been fun, but instead of lingering in 2016, I propose we spend more time looking ahead a decade, to 2036. It’s time to memorize a new, more revolutionary poem.
Who has written it? Or is it still to be written?
I used to be afraid to peer so far into the future, but not anymore. I’ll admit, I’m curious about all the events to come. All the people I’ll meet, the countries I’ll visit, the new roads I’ll drive, the great books I’ll read, the movies I’ll see, the music as yet unsung. Sure, I know the shape of my next film and book projects, waiting patiently in the wings for me once I complete my current one. But I don’t know exactly how they’ll unfurl. (Uh oh, I might have plenty of work, but it looks like I may never have a full-time job again.)
If we remain in the same house, I hope we finally have the cash to renovate our kitchen and our awful, terrible bathrooms. Maybe we’ll get a hot tub? We’ll certainly paint the house and install new windows and a heat pump by 2036. I will drive a different car and wear totally different winter coats. I will allow some nostalgia in 2036: My gold wedding shoes will still be in a box on the top shelf in my closet, sparkly old friends from an earlier life.
It’s weird to think that 2036 will take me into my 60s, but I am at peace with that in a way I wasn’t in 2016 as I looked toward my 50s. I know I’ll encounter cycles of loss, too. Grief is the unavoidable consequence of the privilege of living. I will have a different dog in 2036. I’ll have a different face. I will likely have fewer old friends. We will certainly have fewer cool summer days.
It’s more challenging to predict the political future, the technological future, the financial future. But they are not fixed. I believe we can shape them; it’s not too late. We’re at another before/after moment, but this time we know what needs to be done. The real work is here.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
“What Is Going to Happen?” For more on how the future is not an inevitable slide into darkness, by Hamilton Nolan.
“For 22 years, I ran around with small bags of saline water on my chest.” Sarah Lavender Smith, an ultrarunner and Friend of The Windfall Dispatch, writes movingly about explant surgery.
Ditching a bad habit overnight can sound like a good idea on paper...but is it? On quitting Zyn cold turkey, by Rosecrans Baldwin in GQ.
A must-read by Laura Jedeed, about applying for a job with ICE. Another FOTWD. Laura Jedeed contributed some amazing cell phone footage of the 2020 Portland protests to my upcoming documentary, The Elk.
“Therapy Jeff” is not your therapist. A profile of the Portland-based counselor whose mental health advice is all over Instagram and TikTok. (I highly recommend going for a long walk with your partner and chatting about the questions Jeff poses in this post. And no, I don’t think you should know all the answers already.)
For Stateline, I wrote about the successes of Democratic attorneys general who are using legal strategies to fight the Trump administration.
It’s never too late to be a monumentalist! If you haven’t yet made a tax-deductible contribution to my film project at Film Independent, here’s a big ‘ole button to take you to the donation page.
“Grief is the unavoidable consequence of the privilege of living”. Thank you for this reminder.