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Happy 2026!
I have a funny New Years tradition: I like to read newspapers from 100 years ago.
Why? Because those people were talking about us.
It was a common obsession back then: What will the world be like in 100 years? Experts would offer confident answers — which means that, in 1926, newspapers were full of predictions about our life today.
I love reading these things. (I shared a hilarious 2025 prediction last year.) They make me feel connected to something bigger. As if I'm living in the world those people only imagined. I have the answers they could only guess at. I am here, receiving their thoughts across time.
It also reminds me: The future is always wilder than we can imagine.
So today, I want to share a few predictions from 1926 — so that you can feel that same sense of connectivity, appreciate the world we live in, and gain some useful perspective on whatever comes next.
Here are three predictions about life in 2026, from one century ago:
1. Cities disappear, thanks to air travel
Here's how they wrote it. I'll summarize below.
The idea was this: By 2026, everyone will fly around in personal airplanes — which means that people won't need to cluster in cities anymore. Instead, just we'll spread out across the world, enjoy our open space, and fly to work.
This made a kind of sense back then. Consider life in 1926:
- Cities were dirty. Despite major public health breakthroughs, cities could still be full of dirt, smoot, and disease.
- Airplanes were small and dangerous. They were mostly biplanes, flown for adventure or military purposes. And they crashed often.
So you can see their line of thinking: These small planes will get safer, which will unlock our geographic restrictions.
But of course, that's not exactly what happened. Air travel became safer, yes, but it became dominated by larger planes that move between urban hubs. And cities became cleaner, safer, and desirable.
2. The world will be "standing room only"
In 1926, scientists predicted that by 2026 the world would reach its absolute limit: 5 billion people. Beyond that, they believed, Earth simply could not support human life. Food shortages would be inevitable. Cities would become unlivable. Population growth would stall or collapse.
They would be stunned by today's reality: We now have about 8.3 billion people on Earth. Hunger still exists, but not for the reasons they expected — and not because we ran out of room.
So where did they go wrong?
They were reasoning correctly from the facts available at the time. A century ago, food production was constrained by land, labor, and weather. Feeding more people meant farming more land. Eventually, the math stopped working.
What they couldn't foresee was a total reengineering of how food is produced and distributed. Synthetic fertilizers, high-yield crops, mechanized equipment, irrigation, pest control, and factory-based food production allowed us to extract vastly more calories from the same land. Global supply chains then moved food, water, energy, and goods across continents with unprecedented efficiency.
At the same time, antibiotics, vaccines, clean water, and basic public-health systems dramatically reduced death rates. Infant mortality plummeted. Life expectancy rose. Dense cities, once seen as a liability, became sustainable places to live.
The Earth didn't suddenly gain the capacity to hold more people. We just reorganized how we live on it.
3. Marriage and divorce become casual
Here's how they wrote it:
This article is fascinating. In 1926, a symposium of "noted British women" predicted the future of marriage. They believed it would become more "experimental" and "friendly", and that divorce would grow casual.
On that point, they were largely right. Today, divorce is far more socially acceptable than it was then. The divorce rate is higher now (about 2.5 divorces per 1,000 couples, compared with roughly 1.6 in 1926). Divorce is still painful, of course, but it is no longer taboo.
But here's what struck me most: In 1926, these women weren't arguing that marriage itself was the problem. They were arguing that being trapped was the problem.
They described marriage as "the clanking chains of matrimony." In the article, novelist F. Tennyson Jesse called it "the dreadful feeling of irrevocability." And for good reason: At the time, marriage was often a social requirement and deeply gendered. Divorce was heavily stigmatized, and women rarely had the financial or social power to leave.
They imagined that, by 2026, the marriage contract would change. In reality, everything around marriage changed. Women gained economic, legal, and social autonomy. Marriage stopped being a default survival strategy. People began marrying later — entering marriage with more independence, education, and self-knowledge.
So, what can we learn from all this?
Here's the problem with predictions: They're simplistic extrapolations.
We take what we already see, draw a straight line forward, and call it the future. Because X is happening, we assume Y must come next.
But life doesn't move in straight lines. Systems change. Incentives change. Technology, culture, and power shift in ways that feel obvious only in hindsight.
You probably have ideas about how 2026 will go. Maybe you're bracing for a major problem. Maybe you're pinning your hopes on a specific outcome. Maybe you keep telling yourself, I know this for certain...
The people of 1926 thought the same thing.
Here's what that should tell us: We cannot be certain of any one path, which means it's pointless to worry about taking the wrong one. There is no fixed track to stay on, or to fall off.
With their predictions, the people of 1926 gave us a gift. It is not a warning about being wrong. It's permission to stop living as if predictions are instructions. They remind us to build our lives not around what we expect will happen, but around what we can actively shape, every day we're here.
The future isn't predictable. But it is buildable.
And right now, we're the ones doing the building.
So let's do it. Together, we'll define 2026 for real.
That's how to do one thing better.
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