“And then he said, ‘Good luck in the future,'” my Someone recounted.

We were in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of technological advance and mayhem– for better and for worse. We played an energetic, fun show to an amused audience with three of our rowdy friends as ringers in the crowd. Now, we were walking our dog around the quiet neighborhood before crashing into bed, recounting what the other missed when we shook hands and sold our wares in the wake of the performance. As it turns out, we hardly sold a thing. That’s been our sliding scale as a band since we started. The nicer the house, the less we make. I don’t know if it’s our thriftstore clothes or our willful insistence on being ourselves in spite of the social cues to up our class, but we walk away beating the dust from our shoes with hopes that the door was good, and everyone else walks away empty handed with another evening of entertainment. Not a problem, just a fact. But tonight, under the barely visible stars in a dark northern California sky, my Someone was getting agitated with one of the few sales we made, a gentleman who wanted to pay with a form of payment we don’t have the technology to accept. He became frustrated, though my Someone gave him a myriad of other options to pay. In the end, our more tech savvy friends took the payment and gave us cash later, but not before the man shook his head, admonishing my Someone, and closed the sale with–

“Good luck in the future.”

“Good luck in the future?” I repeated now, “Good luck in the future?”

And then I saw us, a couple of 40-something kids who banked all their money on a stupid dream of not getting caught in the machine. I saw the stains on our clothes, the floppiness of my Someone’s hat, the lack of make-up on my face because we believed in art– in the soul, not the body– in the ideal of change and a deep sense of belonging, only to land in a hotbed of ethics-less industry and be told that we aren’t doing enough.

But then, yes. Good luck in the future– to us, and to all of us.

Good luck in a future where our precious resources are depleted for a lethal experiment, threatening our lives and fatiguing our minds with mass satiation and autopilot.

Good luck in a future where we lack the creativity and diversity of spirit and imagination that things could be any other way.

Good luck in a future where the wealthy become more wealthy, socking themselves in with no sense of a world outside of their own comforts– in a world where it may be easier to ram a camel through the eye of a needle than to have them empathize with a human experience outside of their own (to borrow one great philosopher’s sentiment).

Good luck to the artist, who is only more content floating across the rampant brain pacifying screens. Good luck to the poor, who are billed for the hubris of the rich. Good luck to the polar bears, who didn’t ask for the latest iPhone but will die for it. Good luck to humanity as a whole, who are garnering ever more solastalgia as they are told “Good luck in the future” as though they are powerless to defend it. And good luck to the rich, who are chronically trading their imaginations for convenience.

Good luck in the future, because we are being sold a narrative that it is out of our control so as to further pad the comforts of the people in power. We are sold a lie that our ability to stop the train is not merely a matter of pulling the brake in our hand. If it was true– if the story that we are merely passengers was true– than there would not be so many powerful people repeating it to us. If it was true that this is the only future, that we are being left behind, then we would not need to be told it is so, it would simply be so.

And so, good luck in the future, where the caretaker species is being asked to homogenize as we watch every other species on the planet adapt, grow, and diversify to survive. Because the fury of not accepting Apple Pay is not the fury of one little folk band not keeping up with the times and ruining their career; the fury is that you, sir, are the one stranded with the inability to pay a debt back to a society you have deemed too colorful, too unruly. You are the one who has limited your options and has expected the world to follow. And if and when the technology we have built as God, this Tower of Babel crumbles, and we are left in a swatch of darkness looking at the few stars we have not shot out with satellites, your payment will not be accepted there either. Assuming we have not poured enough repulsive, radioactive material into the soil, you would be welcome to put your hands in the dirt, to plant a few seeds, and to see with curiosity and amazement the things that could grow. Not the Apple you’ve been worshipping, but the one that will feed you.

Then again, he was buying a handbound journal. So, maybe there is hope.