The Future That Expired Before It Arrived

 

In 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta. A bold move.

The name Meta came from “the metaverse", an idea from dystopian novels of a place where people escaped from a hellish real world. And the move was based on a simple idea: the future would happen inside headsets. We’d all wander into a glossy digital elsewhere while the real world quietly smoldered in the background.

Mark Zuckerberg seemed convinced this was where life was headed: goggles on, reality optional.

Now that whole push toward virtual reality has mostly… evaporated. Not dramatically. Not with a cinematic collapse. Just a slow corporate shrug, the way trends usually die …fading like a New Year’s resolution.

What fascinates me isn’t that the bet failed. Big bets fail all the time. It’s the speed of it.

The company renamed itself after something that was supposed to be the future… and that future never managed to become the present. It skipped straight to the past. It promised disruption, but ended up speed-running obsolescence.

There’s something oddly perfect about a tech company doing that. The tech industry worships the future so intensely that sometimes it trips over it, face-plants, and accidentally invents nostalgia for last week.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are still just using our phones to text people and watch cat videos. Reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to go out of style.

Battery Panic

Modern batteries come with dashboards, warnings, and color codes ... your phone practically files a missing persons report when it hits 20%.

So kids today don't experience battery panic. Real battery panic. The 1980s kind. The scavenger hunt kind. The panic that drove you to check other devices to see if they had a fresher pair to steal.

Back then, batteries were household currency. Your quality of life was dictated by AAs and they were always in short supply. The Walkman ate them. The Game Boy ate them faster. Music dragged. Flashlights dimmed. Toys became haunted plastic bricks. And every smoke detector in America seemed to wait until 3 a.m. to announce its dissatisfaction with your battery management system.

Every house had a supply of new batteries rolling around in a kitchen drawer alongside pens with petrified ink, keys to long forgotten locks, and rubber bands fossilized into strange geometric shapes. But along with the fresh batteries were a handful of batteries too dead to trust but too alive to throw away. You never actually knew how much power was left. There was no way to tell them apart, so you’d grab a handful and test them in three different devices before you got the power back or admitted defeat.

That uncertainty is unacceptable today. Now we just plug our phone in before bed and wake up to it fully recharged. The whole thing happens quietly while we sleep, like technology tucking itself in for the night.

Kids today will never understand why my entire childhood felt like a combination of a low-grade energy crisis combined with a desperate treasure hunt.

Technology Isn't the Threat

AI didn't make us lazy. It just handed our laziness a power tool.

But is it removing busywork or removing the work that actually teaches us something?

It's easy to have AI generate 50 ideas instead of wrestling with one on your own. Easier still to ask AI what customers want instead of having a conversation with actual customers. The shortcut feels productive because the output arrives instantly. But output isn't the same thing as understanding.

What can be lost in the process is judgment, which grows slowly, through repetition, dead ends, and the occasional spectacular mistake. Sure, AI can help me move faster, but it can't hand me the instinct that comes from doing the work. Experience has a habit of charging tuition before it hands over wisdom. AI can skip the line, but it can't waive the fee.

The people getting the most from AI don't seem interested in replacing their thinking. They use it the way a good mechanic uses better tools … not to avoid knowing the engine, but to fix it faster.
Technology isn't the threat. Outsourcing curiosity is.

The moment I stop asking why and let the machine answer questions I never bothered to think through, I'm not saving time. I'm giving away the one thing that was mine to begin with: my judgment.

Who won the 2026 World Cup?

 Most people will name the team.

Some might mention David Beckham.

10+ sponsorships. 

$25+ million payday. 

Not bad for someone who didn't kick a ball in this year's tournament.

Nicely played, Sir David.

Nicely played.

_________________________

When the dust clears:

For Beckham: He's found a way to sell the same face over and over. Brilliant asset management.

For the Brands: They think they're buying Beckham's credibility, when they're mostly paying to reinforce Beckham's fame. There's a name for it: the Vampire Effect. The celebrity walks away with all the attention, while the brand quietly fades into the background. You remember Beckham. The logo? Not so much.

The Result: An asset stops being distinctive the moment it's rented out to everyone else. If Beckham is selling everything, he isn't a signal anymore. And while he's building Brand Beckham every time his face appears on a screen, the brands (unless they've locked down exclusivity) may just be paying to increase the value of someone else's brand while slowly diluting their own.