According to recent data from the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of American adults say that if they could choose when to live, they would live sometime in the past. Another 40 percent have the good luck to be born exactly when they want to live. And only 14 percent would choose to live in the future.

These are remarkable and sobering numbers. This is the wealthiest society in the history of the world, and technological change has been plunging forward at remarkable speeds. But so few of us are optimistic about what’s coming that Americans are three times more likely to wish they lived in the past than the future.

There was a time when the future certainly seemed to hold more appeal. The animated sitcom the Jetsons, which came out in 1962 (and was set in 2062), featured a working class that had robot servants and a flying car. Breadwinner George Jetson worked at a factory, and he wasn’t any sort of manager. But his job seemed to entirely consist of pushing buttons, and his workload was light enough that he complained when his boss Mr Spacely made him work for three hours a day.

The Jetsons was the lightest of light entertainment and no one’s idea of a serious prediction about the future. (The family also had a talking dog.) Even so, as a full-color daydream about the distant future, it was revealing. In the early 1960s, the “middle class” had recently and dramatically expanded. The postwar economic boom felt like it could be a new permanent feature of reality. And a whole raft of modern conveniences were hitting the market just as many more people could afford them. Against this background, it felt plausible that future technological progress would play out in a way that would make life better for everyone.

It makes all too much sense that the same confidence is far less widespread as 2025 turns into 2026. The sense that each new generation will have better lives than the last has been, at the very least, complicated by the “disruption” of jobs offering some degree of material security by the gig economy. Think, for example, of the decline of unionized cab drivers and the rise of Uber. And while technological progress has certainly continued, it hasn’t always done so in ways that give people hope about what’s going to come next. Think of the explosion of artificial intelligence.

In many ways, the kind of AI that exists now would have felt like something out of futuristic fiction even five years ago. But the largest social effects of it have been, on the one hand, the proliferation of what’s widely called “AI slop” (i.e., text, images, or videos that feel off because they were generated by a literally mindless facsimile of human intelligence), and, on the other hand, the tangible threat that AI poses to a vast array of jobs currently performed by human beings. Little wonder that so few of us are excited to see where this bus is stopping next, or what’s coming up several stops down the line. (Only 9 percent of respondents in the Pew study liked the idea of living more than fifty years in the future.)

Not so long ago, billionaire tech oligarch Peter Thiel bemoaned the lack of really exciting futuristic developments. Riffing off the Jetsons fantasy of what the future could be, he complained that “we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters.” (At the time, that was the character limit on Twitter.) At the end of 2025, we still don’t have flying cars, but there are plenty of ways that it feels like we’re living in a science fiction movie. We have, for example, a company called “Friend” that sells tiny AI “friends” people can wear around their necks and make small talk with over the course of the day. Advertisements on the walls of New York City subways earlier this year featured outright dystopian promises like “I’ll never bail on dinner plans” and “I’ll binge the entire series with you.” If all this makes Thiel’s complaint that contemporary tech is too boring and mundane feel obsolete, it also doesn’t exactly fill us with confidence that the kind of future Friend represents is going to be an appealing one for anyone but billionaire tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel.

It’s understandable that it might seem far better, if you had a choice, to go back and relive nostalgic memories of your youth (or your parents’ youth, as in the case of some people born after the millennium who love the 1980s setting of Netflix’s Stranger Things) than to live in the dystopic future of Netflix’s Black Mirror. But, of course, we don’t have that choice. Relocating to the past is impossible. We’re all traveling into the future, at a rate of one hour per hour, whether we like it or not.

The real and urgent question is whether we can grab the wheel and steer the bus ourselves, in directions more to our collective liking. When new technologies arise (as they inevitably will), are they going to be implemented in ways that promote human flourishing or just whatever ways harvest the most profits for the CEOs and shareholders of the companies that bring the innovations to market? Will we let art created by humans be replaced with AI slop, for example, or will we automate away drudgery to give people more time and resources to do actually important things like create art? Will we have a population divided between the unemployed and the overworked, with the latter so starved for human connection that they’re reduced to emotionally bonding with the AI pendants around their necks, or will we respond to a good deal of work that currently needs to be done by humans being automated away by AI by greatly reducing working hours for everyone so we all have more time to devote to friendships and relationships with living human beings?

The answers to these questions depend less on what kind of machines we have than who owns those machines. The most unrealistic thing about the Jetsons (more than the flying cars, and even more than the talking dog) was that Mr Spacely was willing to pay a generous enough salary for George and the rest of the employees of his sprocket firm to support their families as single breadwinners while they worked so few hours a week. Wouldn’t it be more cost-efficient for him to lay off most of them, and work the few that remained for as many hours as ever? The difference between this oddly benevolent vision of capitalism and the real kind has been all too obvious in 2025, a year that tech companies have spent shedding jobs at an astonishing rate (just like they did in 2024).

Socialists believe that the economic resources that support our collective existence should be collectively owned instead of being in the hands of a wealthy minority whose interests often conflict with the interests of the rest of the population. How exactly this ideal could or should be implemented in practice is a subject of complicated debate. I’ve got some fairly specific ideas about that, but here’s the broader point:

When people imagine a world where technology continues to gallop along in ways that are shaped by the dynamics of the unequal and undemocratic economy we have right now, it makes perfect sense that a lot of them would prefer to regress to life in the 1980s. If we can offer a convincing vision of a world where we all get to decide how to implement innovations and arrange our collective lives, though, the future might start looking like a decent place to live.