Reflections on the edge of 2026: an unknowable future?

To be perfectly honest, this article seemed like a much better idea when I asked for it. Now that I’m sitting in a cafe trying to write it, worried that I’ve picked the wrong place and soon I’ll be expected to order food, the task seems small and impossible.

If the so-called “professional” journalists and news agencies can deliver you predictions with high production value, something peer-reviewed and delivered on a website they were overcharged for, what hope do I have?

It’s a thoroughly wintry day in Leamington Spa. Earlier, it was characteristically stark and bright; I watched the sunshine and the frost glint from my bedroom window, lying ill and mildly hungover. That part of the day has passed now. Once I finally made it out of my empty house and into the world, the day was past ripe; now it’s grey, and everywhere that bothered to open is soon going to shut.

There is no easy way to predict what will happen in 2026, and frankly, I cannot think of a bigger waste of your time. If the so-called “professional” journalists and news agencies can deliver you predictions with high production value, something peer-reviewed and delivered on a website they were overcharged for, what hope do I have? Even the professional dribble can really only be characterised as an educated guess! How many prediction articles in the festive season of 2007 warned of imminent financial Armageddon? And to add insult to injury, the dribblers gave us an onslaught of books, films and TV dramas designed to make it easy for the average person to digest; personally, I think they’d prefer a decent mortgage rate to Christian Bale pretending to be on the spectrum.

In 2026, there will be more breakthroughs, good deeds and solved problems than I could list with a thousand articles

What will happen in 2026? I, like everyone else in the world, couldn’t know, but I can tell you what I feel in the world at the end of 2025. One way to try to get a sense of what will happen is to see what’s happening now and make the relatively safe assumption that the swarm of dribblers will do what they always do: spread it further and make it bigger, more complicated and more expensive.

What will happen in 2026? More people will spend more money on shoes, a few just because they like them, but people my age will buy them because without them, they aren’t real anymore. More people see someone wearing a horrible pair of Skechers and take it as a sign that they’ve basically given up on life; either that or they’re so socially unaware that they don’t realise how deep the rot of outward judgement has become.

Please don’t take this as a hark back to the equally insufferable nihilistic pessimism of the 1990s, with everyone desperately trying to scream about how little they care and how terrible everything was. In 2026, there will be more breakthroughs, good deeds and solved problems than I could list with a thousand articles; the problem is that people won’t care or won’t know, usually a particularly human mixture of both.

It might not be in 2026, but soon, I think there will be a rise in counterculture…

In 2026, more people than ever will compete for the same amount of space there’s always been. These kinds of struggles are nothing new. Younger generations facing problems that older generations refuse to understand have led to some of the most interesting cultural shifts of recent times. It’s a sad but undeniable fact that the best art and music come from people facing the biggest problems; it’s why you tend not to see very many posh rappers.

It might not be in 2026, but soon, I think there will be a rise in counterculture. Certainly, if there is none in the next 10–15 years, it will be clear that human appetite for change and rebellion has been permanently changed, and that would constitute a disaster for the human race. American soldiers drifted west after Appomattox; people came home changed from WWII. Some coagulated into the Hell’s Angels, having decided society no longer had a place for them.

There are more dissatisfied people in the world than ever, and the number is only going up. Soon, there will be a breaking point, and people will lash out in a way that they haven’t done before, or at least it will seem that way – maybe a rebrand of cultural rebellion from a few decades ago. When this happens, people are usually scared and fascinated and don’t really engage with the underwhelming reality. The scary part, however, is not what this cultural rebellion might look like. The thing that should be setting alarm bells off is the idea that it might not happen at all.