Someone Asks What Current Trend Will Be The Most Regrettable 20 Years From Now, And 35 People Don't Hold Back

Bored Panda asked pop culture expert Mike which current trends, in his opinion, probably won't stand the test of time. "Sharing personal photos of yourself, your life, your family, and especially your children will probably seem very peculiar in a couple of decades," he told us.

"People just now are becoming increasingly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it will be odd in the future to look back and see how much of ourselves we used to willingly share," Mike mused that, in the future, privacy will likely be a much greater concern than now.

In the pop culture expert's opinion, no matter how much time passes, humor is "here to stay."

"Funny thoughts, anecdotes, and memes are popular now, and will have staying power on the internet. People often go online for escapism, and humor has always provided that. I don’t foresee that changing," he said that humor itself is timeless. People will always want (and need!) to have a good laugh.

Meanwhile, we were curious to figure out how to tell if something's a long-term trend or just a passing fad that'll go away in just a few years or even months.

"If something becomes popular quickly and seems to come out of nowhere, it’s more likely to be a passing fad," Mike, Hollywood's Ultimate Insider, shared his thoughts with Bored Panda.

"Long-term trends with staying power seem to build more slowly, but at a steady pace. Be careful of jumping on the 'bandwagon' yourself, just because something is popular in the moment. That’s the scenario that’s most likely to haunt you in the future," he shared.

"Oh, and gender reveal parties? Get rid of them. Let me break it to you- no one cares what the sex of your child is, except you," Mike said, and we wholeheartedly agree.

Predicting the future is never easy. It can be done, but it’s never going to be close to 100% accurate. Well, not until we develop genuine AIs that can take into account trillions of different factors and how they play off each other and connect into a dynamic, ever-shifting whole, but that probably won’t happen for quite some time yet. (But if it already has, Skynet, we love you, please don’t punish us for liking social media so much!)

Aaron Genest, from Siemens Software, explained to Bored Panda that we can get a good idea of what the future might hold, what technologies will be around, by looking ‘upstream’ in the investment space.

"For instance, it takes almost two years to develop and produce a computer chip and get it to market for a phone, and five years to get something into a new kind of car. So if we want to have a sense for what, for instance, the gadgets in our cars will look like in 2026, we just need to look at what the car manufacturers are asking their suppliers to design today,” he explained to Bored Panda earlier.

According to the tech specialist, industries that invest billions of dollars into particular technologies, e.g. 5G or particular chips, will want to recoup their investments. So it’s likely that the things they invested in will, at least in part, play some sort of role in the future of tech.

Meanwhile, Ramona Pringle, from the Creative Innovation Studio at Ryerson University revealed to Bored Panda some time ago that while we don’t know for sure what the future will hold, we can count on some trends to keep going strong: “We love stories, and we love to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Be it oral storytelling, books, blogs, movies, or video games, we’ve never lost our love of narrative.”

According to the expert, people will always look for ways to be together, to be connected to one another. We long for communal experiences, whether in concert halls, being entertained in giant arenas, or remotely.

“Immersion and interactivity have long been goals for creators and media makers when it comes to how technology can influence entertainment,” Ramona told us.

“For the last decade, we’ve leaned into virtual reality because of how it enables both of these. We can step inside a world and have influence over it, and the story or experience that unfolds. I think one of the things we can expect moving forward is, in a sense, the opposite of virtual reality. Instead, more of an enhanced reality or fictional reality, wherein the entertainment isn’t in a headset, but instead, all around us.”

She stressed that a decade ago, people didn’t talk to robots and now many of us do. “Siri and Alexa are some of the more common bots, but we already interface with non-human characters regularly. As technology advances, including augmented reality and mixed reality, I think we can expect that entertainment will be something we can engage with off of the screen, but out in the world, with characters and stories we can engage with throughout the day, or throughout our houses.” So while some fundamental things that people care about will remain the same, the way that we interact with the world—and each other!—can change incredibly rapidly.