The Future Will Be Better

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A trope Older Than You Think, that of a story that informs us the future will not be full of doomsday scenarios, but in fact the time when all troubles will be behind us. All the audience has to do is be patient. Such idealized scenarios are very popular with the general public since everybody is eager for a world where everything will change for the better. The success of this entire idea is entirely built around the premise that so long as the audience still have to wait they will remain loyal. From the moment the future has finally arrived most of them will be disappointed, since expectations don't always live up to the actual accomplishments.

Hope that The Future Will Be Better can be naïve, but many people have changed the world just by gaining strength by believing in their ideas.

This trope is especially popular in religions. All of them promise some sort of salvation or enlightment for their followers if they just keep on believing in the Second Coming or whatever positive future might be coming.

From time immemorial politicians have also loved to promise a better future when they get elected.

Please note that only examples should be included where the supposedly rainbow shining happy future still has to occur from the point of view of the speaker or work. (Whether it did or didn't for a work 500, 50 or just 5 years old is irrelevant -- as long as it was still the future when it was written.)

Compare The Promised Land, The Good Guys Always Win, Everybody Lives. Contrast In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves.

Examples of The Future Will Be Better include:

Music

  • The song "The White Cliffs Of Dover" by Vera Lynn.
  • "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" by Frank Zappa.
  • "The Miracle" by Queen
  • "One Day I'll Fly Away" by Gillian Welch
  • "We Shall Overcome" by Pete Seeger
  • "Tomorrow Is Mine" from the movie Cabaret.
  • Donald Fagen's song "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)", although recorded in 1982, is entirely this, from the point of view of the 1950s.
  • Timbuk 3's "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades".

Real life

  • "You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all the people all of the time." - Abraham Lincoln.
  • Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech.
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