I was promised a flying car.
I want that on the record because a contract was made, not in ink and not by anyone with legal standing, but by a cartoon that aired in 1962 with the confidence of a sworn deposition. The Jetsons looked me in the eye and told me that by adulthood, I would commute to work in a bubble-topped saucer that folded into a briefcase. I have reached adulthood. I own a briefcase. It does not fly. It does not even have Bluetooth. It just sits there, being a briefcase, mocking the child who believed.
The Jetsons sold us the whole showroom. There was Rosie, the sassy robot maid who cleaned the house, raised the kids, and delivered a better closing monologue than most of the humans. What did we get? A hockey puck that bumps into a table leg for forty minutes and then dies under the couch, where it stays until we move. Rosie could vacuum, cook, dispense wisdom, and roast George Jetson to his face. Our robot maid needs to be rescued from a bath mat.
They promised us moving sidewalks that would glide us gently from bedroom to breakfast so that no Jetson ever had to perform the indignity of walking. We built those, technically. They’re in airports. They’re seventy feet long, out of order half the time, and populated by people standing perfectly still on the one device engineered to let them move. A stunning triumph of the future, deployed exclusively so we cannot walk past a Cinnabon.
The food machine? George’s family got a full hot meal by pressing a button: no ingredients, no prep, and no dishes. We got a microwave that turns a burrito into lava on the outside and a frozen brick in the middle and a subscription app that lets a stranger drive your lukewarm noodles across town for a delivery fee larger than the noodles. The Jetsons had a wall that produced steak. We have a wall that holds a calendar of restaurants we can’t afford.
To be fair, to be scrupulously fair, the Jetsons did get a couple of things right, and I resent them for it, because they got the boring things right. They had the videophone. We got the videophone. Except ours is mostly used to say “you’re on mute,” “can you hear me now,” and “sorry, I think you froze.” George Jetson videochatted with his boss to ask for a raise. We video-chat to watch our uncle’s forehead at an eleven-degree angle for the duration of a birthday.
And the jetpack! Every Jetson could strap on a personal jetpack and simply ascend. Meanwhile, the boldest personal aviation device the 21st century has produced is the electric scooter, which we abandon on sidewalks like the future gave up halfway through the sentence. Their apartments floated on adjustable stilts that rose above the weather. My apartment cannot rise above anything. When it rains, the bathroom ceiling develops opinions.
George’s actual job at Spacely Sprockets was pressing a single button. One button. For that, he earned a home, a family, a car, and a robot. I press approximately 4,000 buttons a day, and I am tired all the time. They had pneumatic tubes that whisked people across the city in seconds; I have a bus that comes whenever it feels emotionally ready. They had Uniblab, an insufferable office robot, and we said, “At least ours won’t be smug.” And then we invented one that’s smug and confidently wrong.
So the future stiffed us. Fine. But here’s the part that keeps me up at night.
The Flintstones had a better house.
Think about it. The Jetsons was set a hundred years in the future, and everything malfunctioned, honked, and threw George off the treadmill while the dog watched. The Flintstones was set in the Stone Age—a solid ten thousand years in the wrong direction—and Fred and Wilma ran a fully functional smart home with zero downtime and no software updates.
Their car ran on feet. No gas, no charging cable, no dealership trying to sell you the extended warranty. You want to stop? You put your feet down. Try that with a Tesla.
Their record player was a bird whose beak rode the grooves, and it worked, and it never once told them the album was “no longer available in your region.” Their vacuum cleaner was a baby mammoth using its trunk; it was adorable and never got stuck under the couch. Their garbage disposal was a small dinosaur under the sink that ate the scraps and offered commentary. Their washing machine was a pelican. Their shower was an elephant. Their dishwasher was an octopus with a towel in each of its ‘eight hands,’ achieving a level of loading efficiency my dishwasher can only dream of. Their airplane was a pterodactyl. Their car horn was a bird you honked. Their office memos were carved in stone and are, notably, still readable—which is more than I can say for the file format I used to save my taxes eleven years ago.
And here is the masterstroke. Every one of those animal appliances would occasionally turn to the camera, sigh, and mutter, “It’s a living.” The Flintstones didn’t just have working technology. Their technology had job satisfaction feedback delivered directly, with no survey link and no “on a scale of one to ten.” Their toaster could tell you how it felt. My toaster has three settings, and all of them are “surprise.”
So let’s total it up. The people of the future got a Roomba trapped under a couch, a burrito with a molten core, a moving sidewalk in an airport, and a smug robot that lies. The people of the Stone Age got a household of loyal, functioning, self-aware appliances and a car powered by pure human resolve.
I don’t want to live in the future anymore. I want to live in the past’s idea of the past. At least there the phone was a bird, the bird showed up on time, and when you asked it to do its one job, it didn’t tell you it was on mute.
I was promised a flying car. Instead, I got a briefcase that doesn’t fly and a vacuum cleaner that needs rescuing. Fred Flintstone had a pelican that did the laundry. Fred Flintstone won.
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