My mother told me a lot about the past, of the Dark Days with technology and the internet. She talked about the Third World War, which hardly anyone had survived. “Before the war, people only let their machines and technology think for them instead of using their brains themselves,” my mother used to say.
Before WWIII, humans were too dependent, and when everything—all their systems, computers, technology, all of it—was destroyed in one swoop, they were incapable. They didn’t know how to survive without technology and without electricity. The connection to nature had completely vanished, and so most of them died of thirst or starvation, if they had not already died in battles with other survivors.
“People had no heart,” my mother said. They had destroyed everything. Nature and above all—each other. They knew what they were doing, but they had never thought about the future. They had never thought of those who came after them. They never thought of us, their children and grandchildren. “People were stupid” was one of my mother’s favorite phrases. They were so stupid as to trust technology more than people.
In our lives, it looked completely different. We lived in small communities where each family owned a house and their own piece of land. After a large part of the entire population had died during the war, there was enough for everyone. There was enough space, enough water, and enough food. At least it was like that in our area. We didn’t know what the situation was like on the other side of the globe. My mother suspected that everyone was dead there, “And if not, they won’t live long anyway with all these poisons,” my mother liked to mock.
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When I asked her whether people could have known in the past with their technology what was happening on the other continents and in the more distant countries, she answered ” Yes, technology knew everything. Technology and the internet were the most powerful tools of humanity. They were too powerful even for humans. It has dragged them into a deep abyss from which hardly anyone could get out.”
For me, it was unthinkable that there were still people living out there. We had our own universe here. Everything else was dead, bare, and contaminated.
But we women stayed at home anyway. It was dangerous out there. Father always said that we women couldn’t handle the animals. The terrible creatures that had survived the war of humans were mostly mutations. A form of wildlife that nature would never have wanted.
The young and healthy men in our community went hunting, or they were tending the fields, while the older and weak searched nearby for usable materials. My mother said that people in the past would never have walked like our men do today. They would have had everything they needed sent to them by drone or car, or they would have sat in their hi-tech rooms in front of a screen and destroyed our world even more.
Sometimes our search parties would come back with things we really needed. Matches, candles, firewood, blankets, and clothes, but most of the time they returned only with unusable scrap or empty hands.
The Seekers knew they were going to die out there, but it made them proud. Nobody wanted to lie sick in bed and burden the others. Everyone wanted to do something until the end finally came.
Some women wanted to go with the search parties but were not allowed to. The men were responsible for the physical, strenuous work, and the women for the house, the children, and education. The men taught their sons to hunt and plow, and the women taught their daughters how to cook, how to store food, how to raise their offspring, and how to read, calculate, and write. No girl could hunt, and no boy could read.
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People in the past could no longer write by hand, my mother often complained. They had their computers into which they typed everything, and none of them were able to get proper letters on paper. Now, reading and writing were so important because we had to record everything. All our findings had to be written down for the generations after us. Back then, before the Third World War, people did not appreciate such insights. Instead of continuing their education, they made things up. My mother called it entertainment. She kept saying the word with disgust. She said it had blinded people.
When my mother explained what a television was, I just shook my head in disbelief. Humans had invented a technique that allowed them to look at other people for hours!
The world back then was a bad one, my mother scolded. Everyone wanted more and more, wanted too much. They wanted things they could never have. They were greedy. Inconsiderate. And at the same time so stupid that they left everything to technology. We’re doing better, my mother said.
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In our community, everything was exchanged or given away. My mother told me about the money one evening. I found the idea of paying for everything with paper or lumps of metal terrible. At least that had been the case in the past, because just before the war, money had only been available in people’s computers and other devices. People were addicted to it; they could never have enough of it. Even those who were rich and could buy everything wanted more and wished for more and more. If the rich had given something to the poor, there would have been no rich and poor at all.
It was so difficult for me to understand these people. “They were crazy,” my mother just said. They were completely outlandish. No one back then knew what they were doing, but everyone did it, and everyone cared only for themselves.
The family as I know it today didn’t exist back then. Everyone thought about themselves; there was no room for others. People cheated and lied to each other. It must have been terrible to live in such a world.
What my mother demonized the most was this “Internet”. It has destroyed the lives of so many people, she said. People felt more connected to each other on a screen and as a result, they created an ever greater distance.
People could no longer live without their technical devices and the Internet because they were addicted to it. Their whole lives, everything they did, was connected to technology in some way. A life like the one we are living now would have been unimaginable for them.
They would have believed that without technology you can not live a satisfied life.
But this is not true, because sometimes a small step backward is a big step forward. Sadly, they didn’t know!
The End!
This is my answer to today’s prompt: Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?
I could have picked my own book, Losing It All.
Living through it again wouldn’t be fun either.
Nice story.