248. Song No. 3,694: “The Future Freaks Me Out,” Motion City Soundtrack
I am the Movie, 2003

I miss the future that freaked me out in college, even though it was couched in the immediate-post-9/11 sentiments that made us wonder if we were living in a societal nadir. The future we’ve got now seems a lot scarier than the one I thought about every time this song forced me to look beyond the walled garden of the collegiate world I would give anything to relive blow-by-blow in a Timequake sort of scenario.

Whenever I referenced or full-throatedly sang along to this song as a college student begrudgingly acknowledging that those four years’ idyllic balance of responsibility and freedom had an equally inevitable and unwelcome end, I had no idea what kind of future I was facing down. I worried about the absolutely inconsequential, stunningly myopic things a sheltered middle-class white kid worried about in the mid-aughts, like being saddled with a career that didn’t set my heart aflutter or never making it to New York or being another sad, bitter case of landing somewhere between settling for or selling out.

It never dawned on me that my adult life would be punctuated by national financial crises, international societal crises and global health crises that all seemed worthy of an unironic and not even a little hyperbolic “unprecedented” qualifier. Or that I’d be both living through and writing about those epochal shifts as a journalist, alternately tasked with covering the week-by-week progress of each unbridled horror and living through them with the detached bemusement of someone who chose a notoriously impecunious career, the hardships of which prepared me weirdly well for digging in and riding out the shitstorm.

This song made being unprepared for the future sound like the dance party before the inferno paired with a jocular accumulation of things indicating the cultural irrelevance that comes with aging out of the targeted marketing audience at large. It was also a bona-fide bonding-through-compulsive-singalong experience whenever we blasted it through the dorm hallways or trotted it out at the weekly pub-turned-coffeehouse occurrences or dropped allusions to it in casual conversations for the thrill of call-and-answer inside jokes. It still feels like one of the most perfect Windows Down, Volume Up songs, partly for its devil-may-care vibe but mostly because nothing sounds like freedom and being infinite quite like the soundtrack to my college experience did. And no matter how much the future freaked our collective out, sharing the escape of music together made our shared present feel too good to say goodbye to.