Part of becoming your own person is getting a driver’s license. It means you are now independent and no longer have to rely on your friends for rides. It also means you can stop being a slave to public transportation. Nothing beats the joy of getting that plastic card for the first time.
However, this whole plastic business is about to end sooner than you think. You will still need to learn the rules of the road and pass your driver’s test, but the documents stating you did all of this will simply appear online.
Paper
Poor earth. We have been harvesting its resources for so long we forgot what it is like to live in a paper-free world. Thankfully, with modern technologies, we are becoming increasingly less dependent on paper.
Need to write a note for yourself? Do it on your phone. Need to leave your boss a message? Do it in an email. Need to write a birthday card for a friend? Do it in a Facebook post! Unless you’re an origami artist, paper is simply no longer necessary.
CDs
Making your significant other a mixed CD used to be the ultimate romantic gesture. The fact that people don’t do it anymore doesn’t mean that we’re less romantic. It just means we don’t use CDs anymore. With music streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music, we can listen to pretty much any song we like and send our crush a custom-made playlist.
Music streamers also mean we don’t have to worry about a place to store our music collection. Just like vinyl records, CDs might resurface in the future, but that means only hipsters would listen to them anyway.
Keys
Women’s pockets with no room for keys are about to become much less of a problem. So is getting locked out of your own place in case you forget your keys inside. That’s right, keys are about to go extinct.
Think about it for a second; you unlock your phone with face recognition and get into your office using a fingerprint scan. Why should your house be any different? Some rich tech enthusiasts have already taken that leap into the future. Soon enough you will too.
Landlines
When we were little and kids didn’t get their first cellphone at six years old, we used to call each other on a landline. We would hear the phone ring, pick it up, and ask who it was. Now, none of it happens. We call each other on smartphones, see the caller ID, and then answer the call if we’re so inclined.
Slowly but surely, landlines are disappearing or getting tossed aside in favor of our modern-day god – the smartphone. We used to think rotary phones were ancient. Now our kids think just the same about landlines.