The 21st Century will eventually go down in history for its many amazing inventions and advancements. You probably already have a DVR connected to your high-def flat screen TV, so you have some idea of what’s in store for you over the next nine decades or so. For as much of them as you and the earth survive, anyway.

Despite the publicity, not all of our century’s forthcoming inventions will be fancy toys. Some will be dramatically important wins in humanity’s epic struggle against the eternal darkness. Not to be a downer, but while you’re sitting around trying to solve multi-player Call of Duty and your roommate’s megabong, our brightest scientific minds will continue to noodle away on the toughest problems confronting our species. Wars. Legal and moral issues. Environmental cataclysms and so forth. There will be plenty of these things to work on. Most everything is slowly going to shit while you sit there playing Angry Birds on your phone. Sadly, we will suffer many more catastrophic tragedies before the final big one. Entire civilizations will be totally annihilated, though I’m not at liberty to say which ones, or when.

I am frequently asked if things are generally getting better over time or, as most people assume, worse. The actual answer is…both. The universe continues to expand infinitely, making room for more and more stuff, both good and bad, all the time. And what’s more, both slowly and rapidly. A constant interplay among wonderful and terrible things awaits you. Things like these:

Adaptations
Before our century is out, some humans will return to the seas and start developing gills. This will take much longer than they would have guessed.

Cars
Like many of my clients, you may wonder what cars will be like some day. Well…they’ll be amazing, but they won’t necessarily conform to your pre-conceived notion of a ‘car.’ Some will act more like what you think of now as a helicopter. Or a submarine. But they’ll be badass, and when they first come out, you’re really, really going to want one. The factory stereo they put in those things will blow your fucking mind. Yours…but not necessarily the minds of people in the future. Teenagers in the latter part of this century, for example, will complain about the crappy-ass hovercar their parents make them learn to drive on. But not you.

Dating
The advent of ubiquitous computing has been both wonderful and terrible for dating. The Interwebs make dating dramatically simpler and simultaneously more difficult. These days you can have an entire relationship virtually. You can fall in love and even get married without ever meeting your significant other. This is a truly amazing advancement if you’re able to overlook the fact that physical contact is the whole point of falling in love and getting married.

Back in the day, your dating pool typically consisted of the three 6’s in your neighborhood bar. Nowadays you have access to a hundred thousand lonely singles just like you at the click of a mouse. On the other hand, none of them actually looks like the pictures they post, they only make a third of the money they claim to make and they don’t actually like the things listed in their interests. What’s more, it is exceedingly difficult to tell from their public profiles which of them will end up murdering you if you actually contact them in the physical world.

Dick Clark
Amazingly, Dick Clark will survive the Century. Unfortunately, though he was known as an ageless wonder in the 20th Century, he’ll get creepier and creepier in our times, hobbling along with his disease-ridden, stroke-addled 127 year old mind in its tanned and fit 57 year old body.

Inflation
I could tell you how much the combined bill for your cable, phone, Internet, heat, power and escorts will be, but you’d probably shit your pants. Best not to think of such things.

Libraries
With each passing day, the notion of warehousing physical books makes less and less sense. By the midpoint of this century, most of our libraries will be converted to shelters for our exploding population. By the end of the century, your surviving relatives will be amazed to learn that libraries were once frequented by non-hoboes.

Medicine
This is the century we finally figure cancer out. We’re finally gonna nail that fucker. Other shit, too. Terrible viruses. New plagues and other annoying water-borne diseases. The downside, of course, is that you’ll be stuck with great aunt Mildred for another eighty or a hundred years. We’ll invent amazing new board games, though. New ways to play bingo. Don’t worry.

Plumbing
Before our century is over, you’ll be able to flush your toilet without scalding the person in the shower. Imagine!

Politics
Things won’t change much in politics over the next thousand years or so. In the first world, we’ll see the continuation of a slow, steady, ineffective bickering between two sides. In the U.S., there will be the liberals and the Tea Party, whereas in, say, China, the two sides will be the government and everyone else. The third world with continue to be dominated by squabbling tribes and warlords, who will ensure the eternal poverty of its inhabitants.

Porn
Some of you are undoubtedly wondering what porn will be like in the future. First of all, give up on all your creepy fantasies about virtual reality. You are not going to get a realistic blowjob from a robot in this century. Lord knows, the scientists are trying, but no. Ain’t happening. You will not be fucking a fancy television by 2099. Sorry, weirdo. Incidentally, it will take a while, but man will eventually accomplish even this goal, given his ingenuity and the perpetually desperate scarcity of adequate blow jobs.

As you might expect, the porn itself will continue to get more and more perverted and kinky over time. As it turns out, they don’t suck very good dick, but robots of the future will fuck women’s vaginas in amazing ways we can’t yet even conceive of. Robots with five turbo dongs, each with an articulated vibrating clit mount. You’ll even be able to order them for home use. Just download the one you want to your personal 3-D printer and fabricate it in your utility closet. You’ll be able to customize the appearance of 5er, too, so he can be a chiseled 6′5″ blonde surfer dude or a 5′4″ Hispanic dwarf transsexual, depending on your preferences. Ponder that.

Sports
Despite the continual tweaking, not a whole lot will change about the essential rules of sports in our century. Unless you count NASCAR, which will morph into something remarkably similar to pod racing, making the George Lucas estate another trazillion dollars. However, the accessibility and business of sports will change radically in our lifetimes. By 2065, the highest bid on an NFL TV and merchandising contract will be the Oprah Network’s paltry $4.1 gadzillion. By then, people will get their sports through their phones and the Interwebs, and they won’t need to watch live football on TV.

Time Management
Your ability to multi-task will increase a hundredfold in our century, thanks to one of those good news/bad news things. On the one hand, you’ll have to wear a face shield or a full helmet to survive in your environment. On the other hand, this will give you another screen to display stuff on. All the time. You’ll be able to drive your AquaCar while you read email in one corner of your visual field and catch up on SportsCenter highlights in another. You’ll still have to put up with ads, but hey…it’s not a fantasy world. It’s just the future.

Weaponry
Nowhere is the importance of technological innovation more historically significant than in warfare. History’s winners are the ones who show up to the knife fight strapped with Uzis. The side who can stand just beyond the range of the enemy’s arrows and light them fuckers up with howitzers is the team that wins ten time out of ten. Each successive generation of weapons blows people’s minds and renders all previous defensive strategies completely useless. That’s what’s so great about innovative weapons-they’re incredibly user-friendly, because people have no idea how to handle them. Your enemies practically kill themselves. Just as terrorist tactics kicked you in the mental crotch at the tail end of the last century, the weapons of tomorrow will catch you totally off guard. Some day you’re likely to be attacked by electronic viruses that will infiltrate every crevice of your increasingly tech-dependent life. Try not to forget how to feed and shelter yourself without the aid of computer chips. Someday your microwave may turn against you, so you’ll want to be ready.

Work
Work will still largely suck for the long-term foreseeable future. It will remain the ultimate necessary evil. In the final analysis, hopefully it ends up being worthwhile. Whether the results of your work survive you or not is largely out of your control. Whether it’s done properly should be your primary concern.

In Summary
There are lots of cool things to look forward to in the future. Then again, you may become the victim of a flesh-eating genetically manipulated turbo-virus one of these days. The point is-it’s OK to anticipate future goodnesses and happinesses, but don’t let them paralyze your ability to adapt to and overcome your present fucked up circumstances. Chances are, shit’s not getting dramatically better for you any time soon, so let the future come as it may while you focus on extracting as much utility and satisfaction as you can from the here and now.