Ordinary Abundance, written in 2076

Yesterday I sent you Ordinary Abundance, Jordan Dworkin's walk through a normal apartment.

Today I wanted to write the version somebody publishes fifty years from now.

ORDINARY ABUNDANCE, 2076

It is a quarter past six on a Tuesday in October. It has been raining since four. Nothing about this evening is remarkable, which is the point.

A woman lets herself in, puts her bag down in the hall, and gets on with an unremarkable night. What follows is a list of the things she does not notice.

The repair that happened first

There is a note that somebody came about the heating pump this afternoon. She had not known there was anything wrong with the heating pump. The house noticed the fault, arranged the visit, and told her afterward.

In 2026 you found out the other way around. The boiler stopped in February, or the water tank let go over a weekend, and the way you learned about the failure was by standing in the results. Then the work was yours: find somebody, describe the problem badly, agree on a time, stay home and wait. Households kept money aside for this. They called it an emergency repair visit, and it was so routine that tradespeople built their week around it.

The password retired

She walks in. Nothing is asked of her, because the house already knows who she is.

Bill Gates predicted the end of the password back in 2004, on the grounds that people reused the same one everywhere and wrote them down. He was right and it still took another thirty years.

In the meantime, proving your identity meant memorizing arbitrary strings of characters and typing them into boxes. People kept dozens, reused them because nobody could hold dozens, forgot them constantly, and had to prove who they were in order to be told who they were. Every so often an institution would lose all of them at once and everybody would change theirs on the same afternoon.

The end of searching

She wonders whether the pump was still under warranty. She asks. She is told, in a sentence.

The old method was to open a browser and be handed a page of links, most of them written to be found rather than read. You opened four or five, assembled an answer yourself, and were never entirely sure you had it right. People did this dozens of times a day and called it looking something up.

An expert in the room

There is a clause about wear in the warranty. She reads it, asks what it actually means, and gets a straight answer without booking anything.

Expertise was rented by the hour. A lawyer, a surveyor, an accountant had to be found, scheduled and paid before an ordinary person could ask a proper question. So people routinely signed things they did not fully understand and accepted terms nobody had walked them through. The knowledge existed. It sat behind a price that made asking feel extravagant.

The receipt retired

The warranty question was already settled, because the pump carries its own record. When it was made, who installed it, every repair since, who has owned it. The object knows its own history, and the history moves with the object.

None of that used to travel. Ownership was established by paper, so people kept receipts in drawers and email folders against the chance of one day proving that a thing was theirs, or new, or covered. Service records belonged to whoever did the work rather than to the machine, which meant anything secondhand arrived with no past at all.

Nothing lost

She cannot find her keys. She asks. They are in Sunday's coat.

Ordinary objects can be located now without anyone having planned for it. In 2026 you could only find a thing you had prepared to lose. Small trackers existed, and they worked, but you had to buy them in advance and correctly predict which of your possessions would go missing. Everything else was gone the moment it was set down in the wrong place, and people searched their own homes room by room and were late because of it.

Memory kept

Her brother calls. Halfway through he mentions the thing he said he would sort out in August and did not sort out. Neither of them has to argue about whether he said it.

She has a private record she can ask, the way you might ask your own memory, except it answers. Nothing is public and nothing is broadcast. It is simply that a conversation you were part of can be recalled accurately later.

Before that, conversations were not kept at all. Two people could agree on something plainly, shake hands, and hold sincere and opposite recollections three weeks later. Most disputes of the period were not dishonest. They were unrecorded. Anything worth keeping had to be written down at the time by somebody who guessed correctly that it would matter.

No message arrived in a pile

Four messages this evening, all of them meant for her. Everything else was handled, filed or discarded before it reached her.

In 2004 the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig gave up on two years of correspondence and declared email bankruptcy, after eighty hours of trying to catch up. Two decades later nothing had improved.

Messages arrived in one chronological stack: notes from friends, advertisements, receipts, fraud attempts, work requests. They all looked the same until you opened them, and sorting them was your job, several hundred times a day.

She goes through to the kitchen.

Nothing was counted by hand

She is not thinking about what she is eating. She still thinks about her health, but she has not written anything down about her own body in years, because the recording happens without her.

For a while people acted as data-entry clerks for themselves. They weighed in and logged the number, typed in meals, guessed at portion sizes, recorded workouts, kept notebooks of symptoms to bring to appointments. It was tedious enough that most people quit within two weeks, which meant the information that mattered most was collected worst.

The instruction manual retired

The oven was replaced last month and she has never read anything about it. When she needs it to do something unfamiliar, she asks it, and it explains itself.

An appliance could be standing directly in front of you, blinking an orange light, and the only way to learn what the orange light meant was to identify the model number, search the internet, find a document, and read a page written by somebody translating from another language. People kept drawers of these booklets for machines they no longer owned.

She goes upstairs.

Illness caught early

Her father's scan flagged something in March. It was dealt with in April. He is fine, and is mildly annoyed about the parking.

Serious disease is routinely found now before the body announces it. In 2026 screening existed, but it covered a handful of cancers and a narrow band of ages, so a great deal was still found the old way: somebody noticed a lump, or a cough that would not clear, and by then the thing had been growing quietly for years. How well you did depended enormously on how early it was caught, and how early it was caught depended largely on luck.

The part replaced

His replacement kidney was made for him. It took four months, most of it paperwork.

Replacement organs are produced now rather than inherited. Before that, they came from people who had died, in numbers never close to sufficient, so patients waited years and some were taken off the list for having become too sick to survive the operation they were waiting for. The first attempts to get around this were strange and hard. In 2024 a man named Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a genetically edited pig kidney. He walked out of the hospital two weeks later and died seven weeks after that.

No one waited for a turn

None of the above involved waiting for a slot, which is the part a modern reader finds hardest to picture.

Services are no longer rationed by how many people are available to deliver them. In 2026 they almost always were. You held a phone to your ear listening to music, explained your situation to somebody who could not help, and were transferred to somebody else, to whom you explained it again from the beginning. You took a numbered ticket at a government office and sat down. In England, the list of people waiting for planned hospital treatment reached 7.8 million separate waits in September 2023. The waiting was not a malfunction. It was how the system worked, because capacity was fixed and demand was not.

The form retired

Her son is starting at a new school. The registration involved confirming two things she had been asked about once, years ago.

People used to write out their own name, address and date of birth by hand, repeatedly, for organizations that already held all three. At desks, in waiting rooms, and on websites that timed out and lost it. Taxes were filed once a year in a state of low panic. An insurance claim could take months, most of which was one office waiting on a document from another office.

She sits down to deal with the last of the day's admin, which takes four minutes.

No one paid at the end

Her boots arrived on Thursday. She paid for them, but there was no moment of paying. No stopping, no scanning, no line.

Buying things used to include a separate ritual at the end. You gathered what you wanted, walked to a bottleneck, waited your turn, told the store what you had taken, and handed over money. Stores employed people entirely for that step. It existed because the store had no other way of knowing what was leaving the building.

Made for one

The boots were made for her feet. So were her father's braces and the splint her son wore last winter. None of it cost more than the standard version.

Manufacturing used to punish small numbers. Making one of something cost far more than making ten thousand, so nearly everything physical came in a handful of approximate sizes: shoes, clothing, helmets, protective gear, chairs. Almost everybody wore an approximation of the right thing, and back and foot complaints were widespread and filed under getting older. Teeth were the exception, straightened individually decades before anything else was, because teeth were the one part of the body people would pay extra for.

The part that no longer existed

The pump is from 2061 and its maker stopped producing the impeller years ago. This did not come up, because somebody made one.

Runs of eleven are economical now. They were not before, and a discontinued part meant a dead machine. Working equipment was scrapped over a bracket. Farmers ran fleets of aging implements and kept a second machine purely to cannibalize. The problem was arithmetic. Nobody could justify a production run of eleven, so nobody made eleven, so the machine died.

A teacher for one

Her son is behind on fractions and is being taught fractions, at his pace, until he is not. He is in a class of thirty and this happens anyway.

Individual instruction no longer requires an individual instructor. It always worked, and everyone knew it worked. Benjamin Bloom wrote the paper in 1984 and the title said everything: The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. He had proved tutoring worked and could see no way to afford it for everyone.

So children were educated thirty at a time, at one speed, which suited almost nobody. A child who missed two weeks in October could carry the gap for years. Families with money bought tutors, and everybody knew why.

Every language, spoken

Her neighbor arrived two months ago and speaks no English. They talk most days, in the hallway, about nothing.

Two people without a shared language could not, as a rule, have an ordinary conversation. They hired an interpreter for the important things and gestured through the rest. Working lives, friendships and marriages were shaped by the accident of which language a person happened to be raised in, and people spent years locked out of work they were qualified to do.

Nothing was thrown away

The old pump went into recovery. The metal in it will be something else by Christmas.

Materials are cheap to identify, separate and reclaim now, so almost nothing valuable leaves the cycle. In 2026 it was the opposite. The world discarded 62 million metric tons of electronics in 2022 and formally collected and recycled 22.3% of it. Metals, rare elements and good plastic went into the same hole in the ground. Nobody thought this was sensible. Sorting cost more than the material was worth, so the material was treated as worthless, which it was not.

She checks tomorrow. She is going to the coast.

The timetable retired

Something will collect her at ten past seven, because that is when she wants to leave. She has not thought about it since.

Transportation shows up when it is needed. Nobody drives it and nobody owns it. Both halves of that were true in reverse in 2026. People operated their own vehicles by hand along routes they had driven hundreds of times, and 1.19 million of them died on the roads each year, the leading cause of death for anyone between five and twenty-nine. Everyone else arranged their day around a fixed schedule and knew the 7:42 by name, because missing it meant standing on a platform for twenty minutes. The privately owned vehicle then sat still for the rest of the day, and towns were built with wide fields of asphalt to hold it while it did nothing.

The rain stops around ten. The house dims itself. Nobody in it has had a remarkable day.

The strange thing about the original Ordinary Abundance is not that its miracles are impressive. It is that they stopped registering as miracles at all. Refrigeration is a hum in the corner. Recorded music is what plays while you look for your keys.

The same thing is happening around us now, and we cannot see it for the same reason.

Some of those ordinary things are already being built. They just don't look ordinary yet. They look expensive, awkward, and slightly disappointing, which is what everything on Dworkin's list looked like at first.

Reply and tell me what belongs in the 2076 version.

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