Will the Next 30 Years Make Today Look Like 1960?
By 1960, we had most of the basics covered.
The world had pushed through the Depression. It had survived World War II. Food was mostly available again—no rationing. Cars were improving and gas was cheap. New appliances seemed to show up every year, each one promising to save time, reduce effort, or make life feel more modern.
By 1960, you could look around and reasonably think:
“We’re doing pretty well.”
And looking back, people really were.
But here’s the funny part: if you dropped a person from 1960 into today, they wouldn’t just be impressed.
They’d be stunned.
Not because we all live like millionaires. Most of us don’t.
But because most of us now live with a level of capability and convenience that would have seemed almost magical in 1960.
Communication alone makes the point.
Back then, you had a rotary phone—maybe one per house. Some of us even had party lines, where other people could pick up and listen in. Long-distance calls were expensive. If you missed someone, you missed them. You didn’t “leave a message.” You tried again later.
There was no internet until the mid-1990s. News came from three networks. Engineering was evolving with slide rules—not calculators, not computers. Air travel existed, but it wasn’t the default way people crossed the country. The DC-3 was still the workhorse until jets like the 707 changed expectations.
And that’s just the beginning.
So here’s the question I often think about:
Will people 20 or 30 years from now look back at today the way we look back at 1960?
Will Gen Z and Gen Alpha—today’s kids and young adults—look back at the early 2000s and say:
“How did you people get through daily life without all the things we have now?”
Because when we compare today to 1960, we don’t start with outcomes.
We start with the “stuff” and the services:
- instant communication
- endless information
- navigation that prevents getting lost
- entertainment on demand
- increasingly intelligent appliances
- medical imaging that feels like science fiction
- a world where almost anything can be delivered to your front door
We don’t always notice how much these changed life, because we grew into them gradually.
But they did.
The Compression of Progress
There’s another point that makes this even more interesting: the compression of progress.
When we compare today to 1960, we’re looking at about 65 years of change.
But if technology keeps advancing the way it has—faster chips, better software, smarter automation—how long will it take to get a similar leap from today to the future?
Twenty years? Thirty? Less?
It feels like technical progress is compressing. Improvements arrive faster, stack quicker, and spread wider. Moore’s Law may not be as clean as it once was, but the overall effect still seems to be in place: capability keeps climbing.
But that leads to an uncomfortable side question:
Have we made as much progress socially as we have technologically?
Or have we mostly upgraded devices while leaving the human systems running on old software?
That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the one that will determine whether the future is merely more advanced… or actually better.
To be fair, the last 65 years weren’t just a story of better devices and faster communication. Some of the most important progress wasn’t technological at all.
We’ve seen major advances in women’s rights and access—education, careers, financial independence, leadership roles. Still a long way to go, but unmistakably different from 1960.
And we’ve seen real progress in civil rights and ethnic integration—legal protections, broader access to schools, jobs, housing, and public life. Again, unfinished and uneven, but undeniably better than it was.
In other words, society didn’t stand still.
But it also didn’t improve at the same speed as technology.
And that difference matters.
So What Will Be “Orders of Magnitude Better” Next?
If the 1960-to-today leap was mostly about things and services, what will the next leap be?
Not slightly improved. Not “the new model.” I mean truly different.
The kind of difference that makes today feel primitive.
And that brings me to the real question I’m trying to get at:
Over the next decade, what improvements will actually matter most to people like us?
Those of us in our 7th and 8th decades already know we’ve lived through real progress—possibly the greatest period of growth in history. We have it much better than our parents did, and in many ways we can already see how today’s children are likely to have it much better than we did.
But for the next 10 years—our next 10 years—what changes will actually move the needle?
And looking farther out:
What will Gen Z and Gen Alpha experience that makes them look back at us and wonder how we managed?
Because progress gets measured in real life by whether daily life becomes:
- healthier
- safer
- easier
- more stable
- more fair
- more interesting and intriguing
- and less exhausting
The Future as Questions (Because That’s Where We Are)
I don’t think these questions have clean answers yet.
But there are signs of direction for some solutions, and that’s promising. So I’m going to frame the next era the only honest way I know how:
As questions.
1) Will incremental improvements in healthcare be enough?
We’ve already made huge progress in medicine.
But the real test for the next decade isn’t whether we invent more procedures. It’s whether healthcare becomes more effective, more personal, and less exhausting.
Will we see real improvements in:
- preventing chronic illness
- delaying cognitive decline
- staying mobile longer
- reducing caregiver burden
- improving quality of life late in life
If we can extend healthspan—not just lifespan—that’s a major upgrade.
And along with it will come new concerns around population growth, retirement, and elder care.
This is the kind of upgrade that doesn’t show up as a gadget. It shows up as a better decade.
5 Measuring Sticks for Real Progress
1) Healthspan, Not Lifespan
Not just living longer—staying capable longer: mobility, cognition, independence, fewer years in decline.
2) Trustworthy Information
Better detection of misinformation and deepfakes, higher credibility, and a healthier information ecosystem.
3) Education That Produces Capability
Stronger literacy and reasoning, better focus, real preparation for modern life—not just credentials.
4) Reduced Friction in Daily Life
Fewer forms, fewer passwords, fewer bureaucratic traps, fewer wasted hours managing systems that should work.
5) Social Stability and Safety
Reduced poverty, addiction, and disorder; more functioning communities; fewer people living in survival mode.
2) Will we see real improvements in education?
Not just more screens in classrooms.
I mean real improvements:
- stronger literacy
- better reasoning
- better focus
- solutions to economic access barriers
- better preparation for real work and real life
Right now, education often looks like it’s degrading rather than improving. But AI tutoring and individualized learning could become the equivalent of “modern appliances” for the brain—tools that lift the baseline for more people.
Or we could use those tools to coast.
That’s still undecided.
3) Will we see significant reductions in poverty, addiction, and lawlessness?
This is one of the biggest “progress or no progress” tests.
Because it doesn’t matter how advanced our technology becomes if large parts of society are living in fear, instability, or despair.
Technology doesn’t automatically fix social breakdown. Sometimes it accelerates it.
So the question is whether we can actually reduce the problems that tear at the fabric of daily life:
- poverty
- drug addiction
- homelessness
- lawlessness
- and the sense that things are coming apart
If we can make progress there, future generations will absolutely look back and say we were living in a rougher era than we realized.
4) Will we rebuild a trustworthy information system?
This may be the defining challenge of the next decade.
Will we develop a valid system for obtaining news and information that isn’t skewed by personal and political bias?
Will we reduce the flood of misinformation?
Will we stop rewarding outrage?
And will we be able to detect and limit false information—including deepfakes—before they poison trust completely?
Because when a society loses trust in shared facts, it doesn’t matter how advanced the technology is.
You can’t build a future on quicksand.
5) Will we see multinational cooperation instead of fragmentation?
The next era will demand coordination: energy, security, climate resilience, AI governance, integrated supply chains.
Will we see more multinational cooperation and participation…
…or more fragmentation, tribalism, and political hostility?
The future doesn’t require just innovation.
It requires coordination.
What Will “Better” Look Like?
Here’s my suspicion:
The next big leap won’t just be “more stuff.” Although AI combined with robotics will be significant in what is added to our daily lives.
It will be new capabilities, delivered through services and systems that remove friction from life.
It will look like:
- less bureaucracy
- fewer forms
- fewer wasted hours
- fewer things that “should be easy” but somehow aren’t
- fewer people falling through cracks
- fewer years lost to chronic decline
If those things happen, future generations will look back at us the way we look back at 1960—appreciating what was accomplished and acknowledging that a foundation for the future was created.
Not because we were primitive.
But because we were living at a lower baseline than we realized.
And if those things don’t happen… then the future may still be more advanced, but not necessarily better.
That’s the difference.
A Closing Thought
So yes, I believe future generations will have tools and capabilities that make today look dated.
But I also think the real question isn’t, “How advanced will technology become?”
It’s this:
Will our social systems and institutions improve fast enough to keep up with our tools?
Because tech progress is what we can do.
Social progress is whether we’re doing better.
If the next 20 to 30 years bring real improvements in health, education, stability, trust, and cooperation—then we’ll have earned the right to say the future is truly better than today.
And Gen Z and Gen Alpha will look back at us and wonder how we managed without it.
“The future will have better tools.
The question is whether it will have better outcomes—and fewer headaches.”
