Introductory Questions

Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, Steve Rogers for seventy, Aang for a hundred—in each case, with remarkably little impact on their health. (Rip Van Winke did grow some facial hair.) Imagine that you went through something similar and woke up in the year 2120 (albeit with neither superpowers nor supercharged follicles.) How quickly do you think you’d notice you were in the future? Would beds feel different? Would chairs be strange shapes? Would there be funky new food in the fridge? Would there still be a Global Round in Bangkok? Outside your home, would you encounter a strange new society or one roughly like our own? Or would you encounter no society at all, just a picturesque (and probably terrifying) post-apocalyptic landscape?

“Slice of life” is more than a film genre: research everyday life in the years 1825 and 1925 to learn more about how much things changed between those two years and between 1925 and now. Has the rate of change in your community slowed down or sped up–or does it depend on what you’re looking at?

A hundred years is a long time. What if the same thing happened, but you woke up (like Rip Van Winkle!) only 20 years in the future? What do you imagine the year 2045 will be like for students like you? What are the easiest things to predict–and what are the hardest?

Some things catch fire literally, others metaphorically—and the fires that most interest us are those happening for at least the second time. Without reading the rest of this outline, brainstorm with your friends what it could mean for something to re-ignite, and how different that is than igniting in the first place. When is it better for something to burn twice? And is there a difference between burning up, burning down, and burning with?

There’s no denying that some things excite our passions. For some of you, maybe, World Scholar’s Cup is that kind of cause; others of you might thrill to the fight against global climate change, a big boss in the Forgotten Land, or the harmful impacts of social media. But what would it take to have your feelings about something (or somewhere or someone) re-ignited? Under what circumstances does a person leave a project, then return to it with new zeal?

​Not long ago, the future beckoned with open arms. Many people at the beginning of the 20th century–and even at its conclusion!–were certain that social and technological progress would continue endlessly, that there was a kind of Moore’s Law for everything. (At least one influential thinker still believes this.) Consider the musical selection “Counting Up to Twenty” as just one example of this boundless optimism. In those not-so-long-ago times, forecasts for the future were exuberant—and sometimes even exuberantly dull. How do you see the future, and how does your view compare to that of your parents and other older people in your life?

​“The best is yet to be,” wrote the English poet Robert Browning, a phrase often quoted (out of context!) to evoke a sense of possibility and hope. But we now live, many people are saying, in a pessimistic age–in which some people even avoid having children to protect them from the grim days ahead. If you met someone who was that certain that the future would be full of suffering, would you try to give them hope again? If so, what would you tell them?

​Take a step back from the broader future to zoom in on small things that can also be recalled to life with new vitality: musical bands, TV shows, even products once abandoned to museums and overstock warehouses. (For instance, walk around your school and may spot someone buzzing about with a film camera.) We’ll investigate them more later in this outline, but, for now, what other dead or derelict institutions, products, or trends do you think will become popular again in our lifetimes? Is there a restaurant that you and your family miss that you wish would be revived—and how much effort would you be willing to put into that revival?

While actual resurrection is probably still impossible, at least until Elon Musk is done with his work at DOGE, individuals can still be recalled to life in different ways, as in this first book of A Tale of Two Cities–whether after incarceration, illness, or a different kind of darkness. Do you know anyone who has found a new lease on life in this way? How can we best support someone who is starting over again?