An invisible line was crossed this week as the world officially stepped into the late 2020s. Encyclopaedia Britannica reminded us that the 40-month interval marking the mid-2020s ended on August 31. It’s time to take stock of what we had promised ourselves and what we have achieved. One engineer had predicted a century ago that a large section of workers would have a side hustle by the late 2020s. Doctors had prophesied half a century ago that ageing societies would treat elders as first-class citizens. The score is even on these two counts. But we have lost sight of Ashis Nandy’s 1980s’ vision of future studies as a field of dissent. Instead, the world seems to have regressed to 1984—as foreseen by George Orwell in the late 1940s.