12 Things Every Adult Wishes Existed Already

Sometimes in life we just need a little fanciful dreaming. Little in-your-head-daydreaming-like-a-crazy-person fantasies to help us get through the hard days. Plus, it’s one of the few things in life that hasn’t been hit by inflation, and it’s still free.

Finished your taxes? Do a little mental reverie about winning the lottery (which here in Canada is a tax-free affair). Just conquered the fabled laundry mountain that is said to be unconquerable? You deserve a treat; envision getting your own Rosy the Robot so you can relax with a margarita.

Or fold socks, because I know you didn’t actually finish all the laundry and Rosy is now busy cleaning the oven — something you’ve been putting off because putting your head in the oven would be tempting fate.

I thought I’d put together a list of fantasy-yet-quasi-realistic things to ponder; a list of things that I think almost every adult wants:

Deciding what to have for dinner is the bane of my existence. Every day I look into the fridge, expecting the random ingredients to whisper to me like a Disney Princess what they’re going to come to life and cook themselves into.

And every day I’m disappointed. I do a few laps, eating a grape or piece of cheese each time, until I finally decide what things to mash together into some form of edible-adjacent-ness.

We just want a magic dinner fairy who bibbidi-bobbidi decides dinner for us.

Life has a way of throwing extra expenses at you, like it’s a sly pitcher throwing an expensive curveball. Sometimes it’s simple, like all your condiments run out at once; sometimes it’s bigger, like a sinkhole manifests under your house.

I can’t wait for the day when AI can tell us, ‘Hey, some asshat is going to crash into your Mazda next month’ or ‘Your dog is going to eat a porcupine three weeks from Thursday’. Then we can plan accordingly. Or keep the dog away from that stab-rabbit named Sir Pricks-a-lot.

We have computers in the palms of our hands, AI that can do a thousand things for us, gene-editing therapies, and other modern marvels. Can we get a smoke detector that doesn’t go off if I make fajitas? I want one that doesn’t give the whole neighbourhood a heads up that I cajun’d the chicken that I was reheating in the oven.

Fire detector. We need an actual fire detector.

We all get that dreaded ‘unknown caller’, sometimes with the label ‘might be spam’. It’s an artificial intelligence bot calling us to fuck with us. Well, we need our own AI bots to answer these calls, putting them into an AI death spiral that rips a hole into the artificially-stupid-space-time continuum.

Our laundry piles mock us. They laugh at us in laundranese, knowing that they’ve cracked physics and can open a portal to our dresser and siphon clothes back into them just when they’re near empty. Well, we want to be laundry laughing stocks no more; we want a launderette fairy that magically does it as we sleep.

A dirty-clothing Roomba would also be acceptable (and makes sense since I have dirty clothes strewn on the floor sometimes).

Life is too loud sometimes. Well, a lot of the time (specially since peopley = loud). So we need a mute button for life, just like we have for the TV.

Did some assholianeighbour leave their car alarm going wee-woo-wee-woo-nee-naw-nee-naw-whoop-whoop-whop for hours? Mute. Your other neighbour decided he needed to use his leaf blower for four hours on a Saturday morning (even though he has no trees)? Mute.

We absodiddlylutely, posifuckingtively need a silence button for people talking on speakerphone in public. Mutey mute mute.

Oh, and one for those bosses who drone on at you about the quarterly Pickles Report (or whatever corporations do) and sound all ‘wap wap’ like that teacher from Charlie Brown. Silencio, Señor Cornholio.

When we finally get eight hours of sleep, it should feel like eight hours, dammit. That’s plenty of time spent comatose-ly recharging, but we wake up feeling like our batteries were zapped. I don’t know what sort of demons we’re fighting in our sleep, but we want to sleep like a teenager.

Not a baby; those infernal things wake up every few hours screaming (and we do that already). We want to sleep like a teenager where we pass out in a dark cave, sleeping as long as humanly possible, then have the ability to pull two consecutive all-nighters for no reason.

Wouldn’t life be grand if we had a pause button? We could pause if things got too wacky, or peopley. We could pause if someone says something devastating and we want time to think of the comeback that we just know we’ll come up with three hours later while washing our butt in the shower.

Am I sick? No, I’m feeling stupendous today. Nothing hurts, I’m smiley, the sun is shining. So I don’t want to waste that at work. Sick days are wasted on the sick; we need those days off to go pet puppies in the park.

There’s the real temperature. Then, here in Canada at least, there’s the ‘feels like’ temperature. No shit, we all measure temperature in what it feels like. Then there’s wind chills, cloud cover, your proximity to water, altitude, attitude, astrology, astronomy.

I’m a normie, not a scientist, dammit. Just tell me what to wear.

We need a weather bestie that tells us what we need to wear. We need an emotional support weather forecast.

There is a quasi-scientific correlation between how much you like a food and how much it will turn you into the Goodyear Blimp. We love cheese, but it turns us into a human that could power a wind turbine. Carrots and spinach don’t turn us into a gas cloud, because the food gods are cruel sons-o-bitches.

Netflix and other streaming services have a convenient skip intro button, even though it’s too late for us who already know the tune to the Law & Order theme song and the entire rap for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (me, that song is burned into my psyche). Well, we need one for introconversations.

You know the ones: ‘how are you, great, how are the kids, great, how’s work, great’ and then the other person repeats the same thing. Everybody’s great. That’s fucking great. But I’m bored and want to poke my eyes out with a great stick.

Let’s ‘skip intro’ that motherfucker and get to where we talk about how they’re having a nervous breakdown and told their boss if they fire them they’ll make a viral TikTok about all the grab-ass going down at DeezNutz Inc.

The above hopes and daydreams might all be wishful thinking. At least for now anyway. But you never know what society will come up with in the near future.

A long time ago, I wish I had a universal remote, like the ones for the TV, that worked for everything. Now we have one; our phones can control our TVs, thermostats, doorbells, fridges, and vacuums.

And with AI making technological strides, we surely can’t be too far from the weather report syncing with my wardrobe and telling me what to wear.

Unfortunately, I think we’re still a ways away from the Foodarackacycle from The Jetsons. The machine that would materialize my dinner so that I can save my vacuum, because it texted me that it’s stuck under the dog, again.