This is a work of fiction in the form of my journal entry set in the future. All events and situations described here are purely imaginary and any resemblance to an actual situation or event is purely coincidental.
March 18, 2025
I have always wanted to have a daily journal writing habit, but never really managed to make it stick. My daily always seems so mundane, so unexciting, that it seems futile to even think of chronicling it. I’ve made starts in the past, but within days, or at best, weeks, they fall into a pattern of – nothing happened today, it was the same routine as yesterday, and the day before, and the days before that. And that was how my journalling efforts have hastened to a halt in the past.
If I look back now, I wonder why I could never stick to daily journalling before. After all, a lot more had been happening in my life then. Little things like going to the office, meeting colleagues and friends, going to the park, or sitting at a café for hours together – these seem like rather rare occurrences now but were routine earlier. And if I couldn’t find something worth recording then, I’ll certainly not have anything to write about now.
Back then, that normalcy was boring. The daily chaos, traffic stress, work stresses – being able to stay at home and work seemed like a too-good-to-be-true proposition. But as the years rolled by, that calm became oppressive. They say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps the absence of the normalcy that the chaos had come to mean made us crave those busy, chaotic days all the more. Some of the things no longer make sense – why did so many people commute to work daily at all? Some even spent hours at a stretch on the road. When the lockdowns began, many who had commuted to work every day of their professional life, took to working from home like fish to water. I wonder why nobody realised that many people could simply carry on with their work from just about anywhere. Perhaps, their work suffered a bit when they first made the transition, but things were back on track fairly soon. Of course, not everyone is able to work out of their homes, however, from what we’ve seen over the last few years, if those who can work remotely do so, the jobs of those who cannot, often become much easier. In most places around the world, we’ve seen a lasting, positive impact on the environment. Now that economies around the world are well and swiftly growing from the frightful lows, one can only hope that the world doesn’t squander the environmental gains.
The good thing is that the world has finally realised that economy and the environment don’t need to be negatively correlated and that one needn’t come at the expense of the other. Indeed, one of the biggest positives over the last few years is that the world looks somewhat closer to meeting the global emission goals. Not all is rosy, though. There’s enough evidence to show that these might have come a bit too late and the effects of climate change are for us to see. Environmentalists are also worried about things beyond emissions – increased mining of rare earth minerals, for instance. Perhaps, the twain of ecology and development can never truly converge. There would always be one at the cost of another. While technology can solve many of the problems, the solutions often bring a raft of new problems with them.