Dear People of the Future,
07/09/2022
I am writing this around 1 am, on Saturday, July 9th, 2022. My sleep schedule has been terrible for my whole life, and this summer’s heat wave has made it even worse. (Sorry if global warming is even worse in the future. It turns out saving the world is really hard if rich people can get richer by making things worse.)
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A whole lot of shit happened in the world this week, some of which has hopefully made it into your history books or tomes ancient lore. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson fucking finally saw his entire career go up in flames. Former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe was assassinated. US President Joe Biden signed an executive order meant to protect abortion rights in the US. Richest man in the world Elon Musk backed out of his deal to buy Twitter, the app/website that feeds bad news and anger directly into our eyes.
It’s been a fucking week. But then again, every week since like 2015 has been just too much shit.
I am not qualified to offer insight and explanation of all of these, but I do just want to explain for people in the future that Elon Musk is a fucking idiot and he sucks. Jeff Bezos and all the rest too. There are no good Billionaires.
In my youth, any time I learned anything about the big rich people of the past, like John Rockefeller or Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, it was always lies and bullshit about how great they were and how innovative and industrious they were at improving the world and all of that. And then later if you learn more you discover that no, they were actually all terrible people who did horrible things.
So, if in the future you have glowing biographies about how brilliant Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates were, just know that they’re all lies and bullshit.
There’s a weird cult-like crowd of assholes who love Elon Musk, and they’re all the fucking worst. But for the rest of us, most people are aware that these lunatic rich people are out here making the world worse every day.
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In personal news, if any of you are big Dear People of the Future Guy fans who are keeping track of all the details I include here, this week was also my mom’s birthday (she’s 72!), and the 7 year anniversary of when I first met my cat Charlie.
For the record, Charlie is the best and sweetest cat of all time, and from the moment we met he immediately latched on to me and we have been best friends ever since. He’s my little guy, and I love him more than almost every human.
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This week was also the premiere of the new Thor movie - Thor: Love and Thunder.
I used to joke that in the future, historians will be like “In the 20th and 21st centuries, worship of the Norse god Thor saw a massive resurgence in popularity, as shown by these sacred texts:” *points to a big stack of comic books and movies*.
And I really feel like this movie took that joke and made it text.
I won’t spoil it, for people who might read this in the very near future from when I wrote it, but on top of the action and comedy and romance and tragedy, it very much feels like a modern telling of a Thor myth, and it’s a movie that’s very much about the myths about Thor and every other god (or God).
To be clear, for any future historians living in a world where somehow this writing has survived but the Thor movies haven’t, the overwhelming majority of people living in 2022 don’t worship the Norse god Thor, and certainly almost no one considers the Marvel comics version of Thor to be a real deity. He’s a fictional superhero based on a god from a religion that mostly ended centuries ago. That may be obvious to you, but I don’t know?
But in a lot of ways the Thor movies aren’t very different from the Thor legends the Vikings told around their villages and camp fires. Just like Norse bards sitting around telling a rousing tale about Thor and Loki and their wacky hijinks, the modern superhero movie is meant to entertain and serve as a diversion from the harsh realities of life, while also showing inspiring qualities that adults and children might draw on for strength or clarity in difficult times. So even though the vast majority of the millions of people who saw Thor: Love and Thunder this weekend aren’t going home to pray to Thor and Odin and Sif after the movie, I feel like it’s still kind of the same tradition carried into our present.
And for a movie with a bunch of screaming goat jokes and a whole lot of Guns & Roses on the soundtrack, there’s also a LOT in there about stories and mythology and the nature of gods and what gods owe their followers and how people with power should use that power to help people who need it.
So yeah, we don’t worship Thor in the early 21st century, but we kind of do.
(And of course, there are a few people who legitimately worship the original Thor, and Odin and Loki and all the rest. There’s a whole thing where white supremacists keep trying to steal their symbols and practices, and non-asshole pagans keep trying to tell them to fuck off.)
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That’s all for tonight. See you in the future.
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