In 1998, Bill Clinton was battling impeachment, and James Cameron’s Titanic ruled the box office. In 2025, a twice-impeached president holds office as James Cameron’s excellent Avatar: Fire and Ash rules the box office.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The future, it turns out, is not all that difficult to predict. All you have to do is think about now and extrapolate a little. You’ll probably get more right than wrong unless you’re really reaching.
Case in point: back in ’98, Gallup and USA Today asked 1,055 Americans to imagine life in 2025. The result of that survey has been released, and people mostly nailed it, with a few laughable exceptions here and there.
Most Americans believed the country would elect a Black president, that same-sex marriage would be legal and common, and that a deadly new disease would emerge. That last one seems hilariously and frighteningly spot on in retrospect. What did 1998 landline-owning adults know that 13-year-old me at the time was blissfully unaware of?
So that’s three spot-on predictions. Here are some more: 1998 people were right to doubt that space travel would become routine for regular citizens, but could they have ever predicted that Katy Perry would find a way to be cringy in space? Good job, Nostradumbasses. Sticking to the space theme, the respondents also believed that we would not make contact with aliens. They were right about that, but that depends on how deep the alien conspiracy YouTube/TikTok rabbit hole you’ve gone down. If you’re one of the many who have taken that particular interstellar trip down social media, you probably think the aliens are wearing human skin suits among us.
As for the stuff that didn’t age well, about two-thirds of respondents assumed the United States would’ve elected a woman president by now. Close, but not quite. More than half expected a cure for cancer. While we were not there yet, mRNA vaccines could get us close to it. Sixty-one percent thought living to 100 would be routine. That is kind of happening, just not at a mass scale. The US centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years, according to a 2024 Pew study, but that’s still not exactly “routine.”
Some other stuff that people from the distant past of 1998 got depressingly right: 70 percent thought that quality of life would improve, but only for the rich. Opinions were split on whether the same would be said for the middle class, and people definitely thought things were going to get worse for the poor.
Some stuff is easy to see even when you’re living in relatively good times. Nearly 80 percent predicted less personal privacy, and a majority expected less freedom overall. Check and check. Most anticipated higher crime. In reality, crime rates have been in a steady freefall for decades, a trend that there’s currently no reason to believe won’t continue.
Respondents also mostly believed that race relations would improve and that medical care would become more available. Not much to say about those other than lol.
The starkest, most telling change between now and then is in the general mood of the era. In 1998, about 60 percent of people said they were satisfied with the direction of the country.
Today, that number sits at 24 percent.
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