It’s 2045, and I teach history to thirty children who will never need it. I want to be clear that I love my job. The building is beautiful, the class sizes are small, and no child in this school has ever been hungry or ill in a way that wasn’t fixed within a day.

This morning we did the industrial revolution, which the children find charming and slightly grotesque, the way my generation found the plague. A girl named Suri asked why people worked in the factories if it made them sick, and I explained about wages and rent and having no alternative, and I watched thirty faces try to fit that shape into a world where nobody has ever had to do anything.

Nobody can tell me what school is for now. I’ve asked. The answer that comes back is thoughtful and long and mentions enrichment, curiosity, socialization, the value of shared reference points, and it’s a good answer, and it isn’t a reason. School used to be a machine for producing people who could do necessary things, and the necessary things are done. So we kept the building and the timetable and the subjects, and we removed the destination, and the strange part is how little difference it made to the day. The lessons are better than they were when they mattered.

My father was an engineer. Bridges, mostly. He talks about a specific week in 2019 when a design didn’t work and he sat with it for four days and then it did, and when he tells that story his hands move. I’ve never had a week like that and neither have my students and neither will their children. We have projects. The projects are real in the sense that we choose them and finish them, and unreal in the sense that if we didn’t, nothing would be missing.

There’s a town council here. It meets. Last month it debated a footpath for two hours, three routes, quite heated, and I went because a friend was speaking. Everyone knew that the recommendation had been published a week earlier and that the recommendation was better than all three proposals, because it accounted for drainage in a way none of us had thought about. We voted for the recommendation. We always do, and we’re always right to, and the two hours before the vote were the most alive I’ve seen that room. I’ve thought about that a great deal. I don’t think anyone was pretending, exactly. It’s more that we’ve found a use for the shape of deciding without the weight of it, the way you can enjoy a hard walk knowing there’s a car at the end.

Nothing is stopping us. That’s the part I’d want people from before to understand. Nobody prevents us from ignoring the recommendation, building the wrong footpath, teaching the wrong things, refusing the medicine. There’s no law, no enforcement, no penalty. There’s simply no reason, and it turns out that no reason is far more effective than a law. In eighty years of this arrangement I’m not aware of a single community anywhere that has chosen the worse option on purpose, and I’ve looked, because I teach history and that’s the question my whole subject seems to be about now.

My mother is ninety-one and completely well. My daughter has never met anyone who died young. Whatever this is, it bought that, and when I write the previous paragraphs down they look like complaints and they aren’t. If someone offered me the twentieth century back, with its diseases and its wars and its meaningful weeks, I would not take it, and I would not let my daughter take it, and I think about that more than anything else on this list.

There’s no teacher and no Suri and no footpath. I’m writing this in 2025, and I’ve invented a world I have no way to forecast, so read it as a thought rather than a prediction. What I didn’t invent is the mechanism. Every element of that classroom comes from removing one thing, which is the necessity of human decisions being the ones that count, and then asking what stays. What stays, as far as I can tell, is nearly everything. The buildings stay, the arguments stay, the affection stays, the two hours about the footpath stay. Only the weight leaves, and the weight was never visible in the first place.

So tonight’s exercise. Think of a time your decision genuinely mattered, when it could have gone badly and the badness would have been yours. Hold the feeling of that, the particular pressure of it. Now ask whether you’d choose to keep that feeling if the price was that some decisions actually did go badly, for you and for people you love. Answer honestly rather than nobly, and notice which way you leaned, because that’s the ending we’re most likely to walk into and nobody will ever ask you the question directly.