“Paper No Longer Exists.”

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today I’m once again participating in Esther’s Writing Prompt, which this week is “paper”. I could be writing about my rather disastrous attempts at paper crafting, but did so already in 2022. I could also write about my first diary, which I kept on Braille notes stuck into a handmade notebook. That would be a short post, as the diary was short-lived. I only regularly kept a diary once I got a computer.

Instead, a phrase I read in a teen magazine back in 2006, comes to mind. The magazine interviewed a futurologist, a person who scientifically tries to predict the future. They asked whether the teen magazine would still exist in 2020. The futurologist said it would not be in the same form, because “paper no longer exists in 2020”.

He probably meant paper tabloids and magazines, not paper in general. More generally, he probably meant that our digital age would’ve progressed so far that people would no longer read traditional paper media. That isn’t entirely true even in 2025, though I wish it were (because that’d make media much more accessible to me).

In other ways, the futurologist was spot on about life in 2020, though not in a good way. He predicted we’d have found a cure for cancer and AIDS by this time. This was what soothed my mind each time I had a health anxiety attack and worried about cancer: if I just made it to 2020, it’d be cureable. As we all know, it isn’t and most likely won’t be anytime soon. That being said, the flip side of the cure the futurologist predicted, did turn out to happen, ie. a global pandemic. And actually exactly in 2020.

Back to paper. I just reread the article and it said that digital paper, which the futurologist claimed would completely replace regular paper, would look just like traditional paper but be wirelessly refreshable. I know some people have digital photo frames, but I haven’t heard of refreshable paper that’s as thin as the regular kind.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: the magazine I got the article out of, no longer exists.

17 thoughts on ““Paper No Longer Exists.””

    1. True. I think some technological advancements go faster than people expected, such as AI, but I doubt we’ll ever fully rely on digital everything.q

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  7. I think we have cut back a lot on paper. No more letters in the mail, it is all email. Bills are paid online and debit cards used instead of paper checks. Many newspapers and magazines are digital now. And ebooks are popular instead of the physical copy. I will do my best to keep paper alive though… I still write letters and send cards in the mail, I have the occasional check I write, and I definitely prefer the feel of a book in my hands than holding a screen to read. It is an interesting thought, but I do think paper will stick around a little longer still.

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    1. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective. Yes, I remember time before E-mail, although being that I had access to a computer pretty early on and being that my handwriting (when I could still see a little) was very sloppy, I never sent handwritten letters. I did have my father print out letters I typed on the computer though.

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