For Douglas Coupland, the future (that scary thing) and the present have merged. Everyone is a pioneer now, without any movement westward or in any other direction. Everything is within sight, even if most of it is just out of reach. What is the effect on the human mind of permanent tantalization? The opening of his latest Financial Times column:

I’ve spent much of my life waiting for the future to happen, yet it never really felt like we were there. And then, in this past year, it’s become almost instantly and impossible to deny that we are now all, magically and collectively, living in that far-off place we once called the future — and we all know we’re inside it, too. It’s here, and it feels odd. It feels like that magical moment when someone has pulled a practical joke on you but you haven’t quite realised it yet. We keep on waiting for the reveal but the reveal is never going to happen. The reveal is always going to be imminent but it will never quite happen. That’s the future.

What was it that pulled us out of the present and dumped us in this future? Too much change too quickly? One too many friends showing us a cool new app that costs 99 cents and eliminates thousands of jobs in what remains of the industrial heartlands? Maybe it was too much freakish weather that put us in the future. Or maybe it was texting almost entirely replacing speaking on the phone. Or maybe it was Angelina Jolie’s pre-emptive mastectomy. Or maybe it was an adolescent comedy about North Korea almost triggering nuclear war — as well as incidentally revealing Sony’s thinking on Angelina Jolie. Or maybe it was Charlie. How odd that much of what defines the future is the forced realisation that there are many people who don’t want a future and who don’t want the future. They want eternity.

I feel like I’m in the future when I see something cool and the lag time between seeing something cool and reaching for my iPhone camera is down to about two seconds as opposed to 30 seconds a few years back. I feel like I’m in the future whenever I look for images of things online and half the images I see are watermarked and for sale. I feel like I’m in the future when I daydream of bingeing on season three of House of Cards on my new laptop that weighs nothing, never overheats and its battery goes on for ages.

How long is this sensation of futurity going to last? Is it temporary? Maybe society will go through a spontaneous technological lull allowing the insides of our brains to take a time holiday and feel like they’re in 1995, not 2015. But to be practical, that’s probably not going to happen. Ever. Ever.•