How Will The Future Look And Feel Different?

This trend will be one of the biggest visual differences between life in the late 2020s and 2030s and the period from about 1980 to the twenty-teens – in addition to the shift to now ubiquitous cell phone presence, the relative absence of roaming tweens and early teens roaming the streets when school isn't in session, fewer people carrying disposable coffee cups, and more men with beards, that have already happened.

Other pervasive change in how life feels in the late 2020s and 2030s will be a great increase in the number of people living in central cities relative to office space, more protected bike lines in cities, and the rise of recycling and compost bins. 

Fashion

Ever fewer men wearing neckties and business suits. More men and more women are wearing short sleeves in the workplace as air conditions are set to less chilly temperatures during hotter summers. Watches are returning, but are smarter now, monitoring your health and sleep.

Younger adult women are much less frequently wearing bras, other than sports bras while exercising, especially in casual settings, and have been doing that for a while. Women and girls who would have worn one piece bathing suits in the 1980s often wear two piece bathing suits that providing varying degrees of coverage now. Adult women's panties have also been trending towards being more skimpy. Yoga pants and tights for women increasingly substitute for jeans, slacks, shorts, or a skirt, without anything over them. 

Contrary to many people's conventional wisdom, however, more affluent countries and communities tend to become more gendered in dress and education and professional roles as people feel more free to put self-expression over economic priorities, not more androgynous.

Food

Diners and diner-like restaurant chains like Perkins and Village Inn are fading away. Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle have become common place. Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and vegan food has entered the urban American palette, as Mexican and Chinese food did before it.

The remaking of a shared, cosmopolitan American establishment culture diet is has been ongoing for some time now and continues. This is a question of multicultural integration, of changing lifestyles, of food economics, and of health. 

We know we have an obesity problem, and we seem to be homing in on an overemphasis on simple carbohydrates, too many "ultra-processed" foods, and a more sedentary lifestyle as some of the main culprits behind this, although it is still somewhat puzzling and intractable trend that we don't really understand well. Old conventional wisdom, like the importance of a low fat diet, hasn't stood the test of time.

Drugs

Marijuana dispensaries are now pervasive and common place and are on the brink of becoming much more mainstream since the federal government is likely to reclassify it from a Schedule I Controlled Substance under federal law to a lower schedule which will end the punitive taxes of Internal Revenue Code § 280E on dispensaries and will allow marijuana firms to use banks, declare bankruptcy, apply for federal patents and trademarks, and avail themselves of the federal courts. About half of the states have legalized THC at the state level, almost all of them have legalized CBD at the state leve, and the rest will probably follow suit quickly when marijuana is rescheduled at the federal level.

Other formerly illicit drugs are also gaining respectability in medical niches that will become a part of people's daily realities. Ketamine is now available as a fast acting, short term antidepressant and is also being widely used as an anesthetic used by first responders in trauma cases. LSD and peyote are being explored as PTSD treatments. A significant small percentage of older children, adolescents, and adults routinely take amphetamines for ADHD.

Semaglutide drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are proving to be wonder drugs for Type II diabetes, obesity, addiction problems, cardiovascular diseases, and even enhancing executive function in people with ADHD that have surged to widespread use very rapidly despite their very high sticker price.

Surprisingly, the religious moral crusade against drugs, like the anti-gay efforts of religious conservatives (as distinct from anti-transgender efforts), seems to be a war that religious conservatives have largely conceded, at least on the political front. 

Six months away from the 2024 election, no prominent Republican politician has made the war on drugs an important part of their campaign, and this is not a drum beat which conservative media outlets are pounding any longer. There has been sharp rhetoric aimed at Latin American drug cartels with a strong xenophobic bent, an instinctual desire to crack down on the fentanyl trafficking that is behind so many drug overdose deaths, although this has finally plateaued. But few political arrows have been aimed at U.S. drug users, or harm other than opioid addition by mostly white and often working class Americans, that drugs themselves, as opposed to foreign drug cartels as sources of organized crime, have caused to the United States.

Moral resistance to marijuana legalization has been undermined by the legalization of marijuana in about half the U.S. states without any clear and shocking ill effects. Indeed, marijuana legalization has coincided with a dramatic decline in illegal opioid use by minors despite a relentless surge in adult opioid overdose deaths fueled mostly in recent years by growing illegal distribution of fentanyl, often by dealers who don't disclose that fentanyl has been cut with other drugs from heroin to meth, in non-laboratory conditions.

Red states have softened overly punitive incarceration sentencing for drug offenses as much or more than blue states have, despite their strongly conservative politics, in part, to save on the staggering costs of having the world's highest incarceration rates that has been mostly financed with state tax revenues. Red states have lagged in legalizing marijuana, but his seems unlikely to persist and all or almost all of them have already legalized  CBD cannabis products, which are more medicinal than psychoactive. Bipartisan federal legislation has mildly relaxed sentencing for drug offenses.

Demographic Trends

This said, however, the global demographic transition that has emerged hand in hand with economic development all over the world in every religion and culture that has experienced economic development shows no signs of abating. 

The average age of marriage has risen a lot hand in hand with a larger share of women attending college and weaker economic prospects for couples who don't have college degrees. The percentage of men and women who never marry has surged, as women choose not to and men can't find partners to marry as a result (and as more men who don't have college degrees can't fulfill a role as a primary economic provider for their families). Couples who do marry are increasingly close in age. Men and women are having children later in life. A large share of children in the U.S. are born to unmarried mothers, although many of those mothers are cohabiting with the fathers of their most recent child at the time. 

While divorce rates for college educated couples have plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s, divorce rates for couples without college degrees have reached unprecedented levels despite falling marriage rates (with a majority of these couples having a first child before rather than after getting married). This is driven mostly by the economic stagnation experienced by men without college degrees as the economy has developed greater intellectual requirements in a modern, automated and computerized work environment in a sophisticated complex bureaucratic society. Black families started experiencing these trends in the 1960s and have reached the most extreme realization of them, with children raised by unmarried mothers becoming the norm. But working class white families and Hispanic families are following suit thirty and forty years later. Strong social welfare systems have also made this pattern viable and the norm for lots of middle class Northern Europeans. 

These factors combined have led to a marked drop in the total fertility rate (roughly speaking the number of children per lifetime per woman) almost everywhere worldwide outside of non-elite families in sub-Saharan Africa, and outside of Gaza and Afghanistan. The decline has been seen in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, in East Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, among Protestants and Catholic alike.

There have been subcultures, especially among religious conservatives, pushing "tradwife" traditional housewife roles and pro-natalist agendas. But the Mormons are real the only organized movement that has had any success in implementing this agenda. And, they have seen their share of Americans decline by a third over the last fifteen years to a mere 1.2% of religious adherents in the United States. 

It is unclear if the Dobbs decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, and other ruling of an ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court will turn the tide. Courts and voter initiatives in several Red States, and a handful of dissenting GOP legislators in Arizona, have restored some or all of the abortion rights that Dobbs took away. Abortion drugs for some early term pregnancies, and interstate travel from states where abortion is banned to those where it is legal have caused the number of abortions carried out to decline far less than was anticipated in the wake of Dobbs. Even Donald Trump has bucked the Republican grass roots by taking the position that abortion laws should be decided on a state by state basis and not strongly advocating an anti-choice position. All of this suggests that Republican efforts to roll back the clock of reproductive rights and women's rights may not be the major step backward turning point that it seems once the dust settles over the next few years, regardless of who wins the Presidential election.

East Asian total fertility rates have fallen to the lowest levels because all worldwide, because the factors delaying marriage and child birth are present there in spades, but out of wedlock births remain extremely rare there. Out of wedlock births are rare there, in part, because neither the social safety net nor family law rules provide nearly as much support and protection to single mothers there, and because abortion is less taboo there.

For example, in Japan, much of the social safety net provided by government in Western Europe is provided by large corporate employers, to whom single parents have no access, there.

Concretely, in people's daily lives, this means smaller families, more only children, fewer siblings, far fewer families with three or four or five or more kids (especially, in couples that have not recently immigrated from countries where larger families are common) and far fewer cousins, aunts, and uncles, although longer life spans mean that more children know not just their grandparents but their great-grandparents well. In working class America, it means that lots of kids are raised by single mothers with little contact with with their fathers or father's side of the family during their childhoods. Part of the reason that housing supplies are tight in many areas is that smaller households required more distinct housing units to house the same number of people, as typical family households now have three or four, instead of four to six family members. This trend toward smaller families muddled somewhat by complex blended families resulting from fragile marriages and even more fragile cohabitations that produce children.

It will be interesting to see if polygamy laws change anywhere in the U.S. as this becomes an issue of Muslim immigrants and leftist polyamory advocates, and not just vanishingly few Mormon fundamentalists in a handful of distinct geographic places.

Shrinking families make community and government safety nets and support more important, and reduce the relevance of nepotism and clannishness in American life. This is also impacted by the fact that Americans are among the most mobile people geographically in the world. Less than 59% of Americans age 25 or older live in the state where they were born, far less comparable mobility levels in any country in Europe, and especially in Western states there is even more mobility. Less than 20% of people aged 25 or older in Nevada were born there and more of these adults in Nevada were born outside the United States than were born in Nevada.

Race

Interracial couples, married and dating alike, are no longer as striking, and mixed race children are much more common. Interracial marriage rates of native born Hispanics, Asian-Americans (including East Asians, Southeast Asians, and East Asians), Native Hawaiians, and Native Americans are all very high, and interracial marriage rates for whites (who have few non-white prospective marriage partners in some parts of the U.S.) and blacks, while lower, are at record highs. Jewish outmarriage rates to non-Jews are also very high.

The U.S. is basically seeing shrinking proportions of purely white European stable proportions of black Americans, and a rapidly growing share of mixed race, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian Americans, as well as African immigrants, who are starting to blend into a "brown" plurality that is not starkly internally divided by race or deeply separated from or antagonistic to white Americans, in a manner similar to how Catholic immigrants, especially from Ireland, Italy, and Spain were assimilated into a pan-ethic white American identity. 

The cultural divide in the U.S. between native born black Americans and those of other races is higher, but not as high as it has been for most of American history since the abolition of slavery in 1865 that was replaced by de jure and de facto segregation until long after the victories of the Civil Rights movement a century later. The emergence of significant ethnic populations that are neither black nor white has helped bridge the cultural racial gaps between blacks and whites in the United States.

Homosexuality And Transgender Realities

Homosexuality and same sex couples are unremarkable, and not that controversial. A conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court established a right to same sex marriage, and there are a number of high profile politicians and celebrities who are gay or lesbian. They haven't abandoned this fight entirely, but they have deemphasized it.

The Christian conservative right has diverted its current efforts to scapegoating transgender people instead focusing on homosexuality, which is more common, more mainstream, and easier to understand.

It isn't clear how successful and sustained the religious conservative scapegoating of transgender people will persist. Those targeted don't have much of an ability to fight back on their own, and have broad but not very intense support from much of the rest of the political left, which is impotent at the state level in many Red States.

Housing, Land Use, and Remote Work

 

Land use regulation reform and New Urbanism seems to be finally hitting their stride in response to an affordable housing crisis, with state laws forcing major liberalizations of zoning regulation of residential development density in states including California and Colorado, and local municipal reforms in cities like New York. We're seeing more townhouses, more midsized apartment buildings, more conversions of office buildings to residential use, and more apartment buildings with first floor retail. 

Accessory dwelling units (i.e. "granny flats" and "tiny homes" on existing single family home lots) that are built as extended family housing or rental units are being legalized in more places and need just a little nudge to take off exponentially. Parking requirements are being dispensed with, especially near major transit lines and in walkable developments. 

There hasn't yet been much restoration of pre-zoning law land use patterns like single occupancy hotels and boarding houses, but the legal authority to do that kind of development is quietly being put into place. The same legal developments are also laying the groundwork for another round of cooperative housing with shared kitchens and common areas in basically an owned boarding house arrangement that flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s before the governance and social interaction issues associated with them took the shine off of them. But the less ambitious project of having single family homes with multiple unrelated households in them, either by subdividing them physically or just having the room tenants share a house like college students is also supported by these land use reforms and is already quietly becoming more common.

We are still working out the remote work issue. But the pandemic gave videoconferencing the boost it needed to become a part of every day work life and extended family interactions. The percentage of office workers who work remotely at least part of the time has surged, although probably less than half of them are fully remote workers. A pandemic generation that attended school remotely makes this way of working a lot more familiar.

Religion

Plenty of people still attend church with some regularity, but it is no longer socially assumed that everyone does, even in the South and rural America. It is also increasingly no longer assumed that everyone is Christian. 

"Nones" and Muslims make up a growing share of Americans, while almost all forms of Christianity have a decreasing percentage of Americans who adhere to it (apart from some definitional arbitrate as Evangelical Protestant denomination adherents rebrand themselves as non-denominational Christians).

About 30% of adults view themselves as "not religious" and almost half of young adults identify that way, in a dramatic growth over the last half century.

Muslims have become much more common due to immigration and to a lesser extent due to native born African-American converts, and are increasingly a visible presence in daily life. Halal food offerings are now almost as common as Kosher ones, and institutions like schools now have to be conscious of Muslim holidays and holy days (although public calls to prayer five times a day, which are pervasive in Muslim majority countries, are absent).

Mormons have resisted the trends of late marriage, fewer marriages, less stable marriages, and fewer children, more than any other faith in the U.S. But while natural growth from these natalist attitudes has helped to keep the number of Mormons declining as much as mainline Christians, white Catholics, and white Protestants, neither natural growth nor a massive missionary effort deeply ingrained in this faith, have been enough for them to increase the share of Mormon adherents in the overall population much. For example:

Between 2007 and 2022, the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Mormon has dropped from 1.8 percent to 1.2 percent (according to an independent tabulation of election survey data) - a percentage decrease of one-third over 15 years.

Via Wikipedia.

Communication, Transportation and Energy

Other look and feel changes in daily life already happened a while ago. 

Landline phones are almost gone. Fewer and fewer people read dead tree newspapers. Broadcast and cable TV have already been replaced by streaming to a great extent. Satellite radio and apps like Spotify have gradually undermined major radio stations that used to be a pervasive sound track to almost everyone's life.

Paper checks and postal money orders sent in the mail are becoming a thing of the past, while cash apps have started to become mainstream even though they are somewhat uncommon. Invoices and appointment reminders now come via email and text rather than snail mail. Email and texts have also increasingly replaced letters. Court documents are now usually e-filed and the service has been made available to non-lawyer litigants in many cases. Tax forms are usually e-filed too, and sooner or later, the IRS will cast aside the fax machine - a technology that is increasingly used by no one else - in favor of secure online portals. 

Parcel post from the postal service has increasingly lost market share to private delivery services as online shopping has led to a resurgence in package deliveries. Homes increasingly have front porch video streaming, in part, to deter porch pirates who steal those parcels. Quality photography and videography from cell phones, pervasive security and laptop cameras, dash cams, and body cameras, cheap and small tracking devices, cell phone GPS and Wi-Fi locator technology, and digital payment systems have made a well documented surveillance society an every day reality.

As typing has replaced dead tree writing, cursive writing has waned as well and will soon go the way of the slide rule. Voice operated computer system are already common in big business phone systems, where they compete with international call centers in India and the Philippines. Dictation, now done by computers instead of secretaries, is making a gradual return. And, real time voice to voice language translation is on the brink of becoming commonplace - it is already widespread as a cheap and fast way of doing text to text language translation.

Most cars are now keyless and manual transmission has virtually vanished from the United States. A modest but growing share of vehicles are plug in electric. We are on the brink of widespread use of self-driving vehicles, although we aren't quite there yet. When the do arrive, this will have a profound effect on the long haul trucking industry, as robots replace humans on our interstate highways (probably with greater safety).

Smart phones, GPS, and computer networks with AI features, have already enabled ride sharing that has effectively restored decentralized, thinly regulated taxi service to much of the U.S., and has facilitated easy scooter and bicycle and e-bike rentals. Online real estate sharing services like Airbnb have vastly increased the supply of hotel and bed and breakfast type services on a decentralized basis, with vacationers now as likely to stay in an online brokered short term rental of a private home as they are to stay in a hotel.

Life in 2024 is full of battery charging. Laptops, smart phones, smart watches, headphones, toothbrushes, shavers, cars, and even device and home backup power systems, all have batteries that must be regularly recharged with customized power charges, and can even pose fire hazards on commercial airline flights. But this part of daily life will soon make some subtle but noticeable changes. Spurred by the demand for better electric car batteries, several new game changing battery technologies for electric cars, like solid state batteries with different raw materials will enter the marketplace in the mid- to late-2020s. The new batteries will store several times more energy than existing electric vehicle batteries, will have longer lives with less depletion in capacity as they are recharged repeatedly, will recharge more quickly, will cost less, will have less of an environmental impact, and will be safer. This will make electric vehicles in every context where internal combustion engines (ICEs) running on gasoline or diesel fuel more competitive vis-a-vis ICE vehicles - cars, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, construction equipment, farm equipment, military vehicles, boats, and even propeller driven short haul aircraft and drones. It will make electric lawn mowers and leaf blowers and snow blowers more attractive via existing two stroke engine models. It will mean that laptops and cell phones and smart watches and headphones and toothbrushes and shavers that used to have to be charged daily will be able to manage with a couple of rounds of charging a week.

Supersonic commercial airline flights across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are on the brink of returning after the supersonic transatlantic Concorde flights from New York City to Paris and London were discontinued after a couple of decades of limited and unprofitable service.

Intracity passenger rail has experienced a minor resurgence over the past few decades although this trend may have neared its peak for a while. There are a handful of intercity high speed passenger rail corridors in the U.S. which are built or in progress, although few meet the standards of Western Europe, Japan, and China, and it will still be many decades before this really becomes an feature of American life for most people.

Modern heat pumps are replacing air conditioning and gas forced air HVAC systems in homes. Home and business solar panels are now common and meet a decent share of household electricity demand, sometimes feeding energy back into the grid. Trains full of coal to deliver to utility power plants are a lot less common, while large utility company wind mills to generate electricity are common worldwide.