Walk into any shopping mall today. It will be filled with an incredible number of items. It may not seem incredible unless you have been living in a cave all your life, but try to imagine that you’ve never been in a shopping mall before. Look around and see the thousands upon millions of goods. All of it will outlive its use, and most of it will outlive us. The malls are stocked with future garbage, fastened securely with little plastic ties to cardboard boxes, unlikely to be recycled. Little is mended or repaired. We waste our resources briskly, buying absurdity. Why?

Amusement will always be necessary in our lives. Buying new things is a legitimate way to amuse oneself - just ask anyone. The more absurd the thing is, the more amusing it can be.

Comedy won. Tragedy was conquered, utterly. Frivolity is the new freedom and the new master.

A billion or so bits of plastic will help fill landfills, and also will be found everywhere else. Mundane, tedious and cheap labor will produce this trash. Many workers will intoxicate themselves in their spare moments of freedom to avoid losing control of their sanity, so they can work another day, and another. Others will live a healthy life in quiet misery. Intelligent, detestable human beings will profit from it all. Hasn't changed yet. Millenniums pass.

Capitalist economies will rise and recede as naturally as the tides. An undertow takes back every crest.

In the aftermath of a global economic collapse, the shopping malls will glimmer with shards of glass. In these future graveyards of the human psyche, much will remain preserved. What people once bought for the thrill of spending, won't be worth stealing.