This is a work of speculative fiction: a letter from an imagined future, written to make the consequences of everyday choices feel personal.
Ma, please stop for a moment. I know you are looking for your keys. I know there is something you meant to order and somewhere you need to be. I remember how ordinary all of that felt.
This is me, many years from now. I cannot prove it in a way that makes this sensible, so I need you to keep reading while it still sounds impossible.
The world I am writing from is smaller than the one you know. Not because there are fewer people who need a place in it, but because so much of what made a place liveable has become difficult to obtain. Water, food, shelter, a way to reach the people you love: these have become the things around which a day is organised.
What frightens me most is how ordinary the beginning looked. Convenience arrived in little parcels. Every purchase seemed too small to matter. Every message suggested that somebody clever had already dealt with the consequences. We kept asking for more because more was presented as the safe and normal choice.
The technology was impressive. It made the present easier to navigate. We were much slower to ask what it required from the world around us, who carried those costs and what would happen if everyone kept asking for more at once.
I wish I could tell you that we became strangers to one another. It would make the story simpler. But people still help. Neighbours share food, guard gardens and look for those who have gone missing. Kindness is the last infrastructure that keeps working when everything else becomes uncertain.
That is why I am writing. Not because I think one person can repair the future alone, but because people can change what they accept, what they demand and what they make normal together.
Please ask harder questions of the stories that sell you convenience. Ask what lasts, what can be repaired and what you actually need. Ask who benefits when responsibility is always postponed. Support the choices that make a shared future possible, even when they are less immediately exciting.
And put the phone down sometimes. Being here with one another is also something we should stop treating as an unlimited resource.
You still have time to make choices I can only wish for. Please do not let the ordinary urgency of today become the reason tomorrow was never considered.
I love you.
