It’s 2060, and the exhibition about the 2020s occupies four rooms. I’ve read the guidebook. It doesn’t say who curated it, which is either an oversight or the most interesting fact about the whole thing.

The first room is the phones. Dozens of them in a long case, arranged by year, and the label explains that a person carried one at all times and consulted it a few thousand times a day. Visitors find this room touching rather than absurd, the way we find a Victorian mourning brooch touching. There’s a short film of people walking down a street in 2024, all looking down, and it plays on a loop, and nobody laughs.

The second room is the arguing. A whole wall of it, reproduced at reading height: the posts, the threads, the panel discussions, the op-eds, the conference titles. Was it conscious. Was it overhyped. Would it take the jobs. Was worrying about it a distraction from more urgent harms, or were the more urgent harms a distraction from it. The label is four sentences long and the third sentence is the one people photograph. It says that the debate was conducted with unusual energy for roughly a decade and that the questions it settled were not the questions that mattered.

The third room is an office, reconstructed. Desks, screens, a kettle, a whiteboard with someone’s actual handwriting on it, and eleven chairs. The label explains that adults came to rooms like this most days, sat down for eight hours, and were given money in exchange for their time, and that the arrangement structured not only the economy but personal identity, social status, geography, and the shape of the day. Schoolchildren find this room the hardest to believe. Their teachers explain it twice.

The fourth room is small and badly lit and has one thing in it. A handwritten shopping list, from 2026, found in a coat. Milk, bin bags, something illegible, call Mum. The label is one sentence: this was written by a person, alone, without assistance, and no copy of it exists anywhere else. People stand in front of it for a long time. The guidebook notes, with what I’d call a curatorial straight face, that this is the most visited object in the exhibition.

What isn’t in the museum is the part I keep thinking about. None of the things we thought were the story. Not the model releases we treated as historic. Not the summits. Not the names of the companies, which appear once, in a caption, spelled correctly. And not a single one of the arguments from the second room is presented as having been won, because from where the curator stands the arguments look less like a debate and more like weather that happened over a period during which something else was going on.

There’s no museum and no shopping list. I’m writing in 2025, and the whole thing is a device: the only way I know to look at the present from outside is to imagine somebody looking back at it, and then notice which of my own certainties don’t survive the trip. Try it on your own decade and you’ll find the same thing I did, which is that the objects that survive are never the ones that felt important, and the arguments never survive at all.

The one thing I’d defend as more than a device is the fourth room. Whatever comes, some part of what we were will be interesting later precisely because it was unassisted and ordinary and done by a person who wasn’t performing. Not our best work. Our ordinary evidence. Which suggests, if you want a practical thought from a fictional museum, that the things worth leaving are not the ones you’d curate.

Tonight’s exercise. Pick four objects from your own life for a room about the 2020s, and set one rule: nothing chosen to make you look good. Most people’s first three are achievements and the fourth is the real one. Then ask what the label would say about the person who owned them, and whether it’s the label you’d want. You’ve got some time to change it, which is more than the people in the second room had, since they spent theirs arguing.