Meditations on Minnesota and the Future of the US

(photo by myself)

Sometimes, I feel like my entire life is nothing but a continuous flow of long, empty hallways.

This is a common site across Minnesota. In the small towns where everything is slowly crumbling to dust now that everyone able-bodied has moved away and in the big cities where everything is tended to but still barely used.

I feel like there's an argument to be made that places like this, the cities and states that have already begun to show their aging and ultimately dying population, represent a prototype version of what the United States at large will soon look like.

We can already see the decrease in population that will lead to this future in the lessened traffic where what was once an hour-long commute is now 20 minutes, in the empty shops where four retail associates bound out of various corners to aid you in your search for a phone cable within a few seconds of entry, and in the half-used event spaces that sit so silent you can hear the wind gently pushing against the windows as clearly as if you were in it yourself. But even this is only the beginning in light of our 25% of the total population worth of senior citizens who could die at any moment of nothing more than their cells giving out and our 21% at middle-agers for whom retirement is not only a goal but nearly around the corner, who will together leave this country nearly half-empty on a day-to-day basis in only a few years.

Certainly, some areas will likely thrive in the new United States, defacto city-states that grow in economic force as more and more people move from their quiet near-abandoned cities in the hopes of their lives meaning something to someone.

But, the majority of the land mass that makes up the United States, from the edge of New England to the beginning of the West Coast and from Texas upward, will likely start to look more and more like this: neat, tidy, maintained, but ultimately long and empty and quiet.