A Changed Culture

Slowly scrolling through your phone, you’re surprised to see just how instant and widespread the changes have been. Dating apps like Tinder have entirely vanished from the app store. All mention of dating has disappeared from people’s social media accounts.

You search through the social media accounts of some of your schoolmates, who you know for a fact, are already in relationships, only to find that all records of their relationships have disappeared. You’re surprised at first, though it soon makes sense to you. After all, according to the very rules you’d just implemented, these people would have no way of even having romantic partners until their assigned lottery day, which in this case has yet to come.

Your curiosity growing stronger, you continue to scroll through social media and other websites, looking for all the many aspects of culture and media that have changed as a result of your new rules.

You quickly find that almost all romance movies have either ceased to exist, or had their plots changed significantly, in order to align with the assigned partner system of this new modern society.

Eventually, you begin searching up the names of male and female celebrities, and quickly discover that in this new world it’s quite a common fantasy for teens to dream of ending up getting paired in the lottery with teen celebrities and actors. The lottery dates for young actresses like Lindsay Lohan and Emma Watson were both watched with anticipation, as teen boys prayed to have their names drawn.

You spend the next few hours scrolling through old articles from the early 2000s talking all about the lottery dates of young celebrities, along with what schools the girls had chosen to enter their names into for the lottery. The articles also give reports on the identities of the very happy boys who ended up getting paired up with the actresses during their lottery.

Eventually, you realize that the articles aren’t going to go anywhere and that there are more important things to be doing right now.

You quickly open your school’s official website to find that the school calendar has placed your grade’s lottery date… tomorrow. Tomorrow also being the first day back to school from Winter Break.

Opening your messages, you find that the chats you’ve had with your friends over the past few weeks have been entirely changed from how you remember them. Last night you’d mostly texted your friends about how much you were dreading going back to school once break was over. Yet now, all your communications were about one thing and one thing only, talking about all the possible girls you and your friends might end up getting partnered with tomorrow on lottery day.

You’d each debated which cheerleader would be the best in bed, which goth girl would be the most exciting, which member of the student council would be the best study partner, etc etc. You all ended up having wildly different opinions on what girl would be the best to get paired with in general tomorrow.

Continuing to read through the texts, you can’t help but laugh at the constant repeated joke of who would end up getting Carmon’s twin sister Cary, who would also be in the same lottery as all of you this year. Though based on Carmon’s replies, he was not much a fan of these jokes.

After many hours of staring at your phone, you look forwards from where you’re sitting in the garden to see that your parents have both gotten back from work. Putting your phone away, you quickly turn around and begin heading into the house to find a seat at the dinner table, curious to ask your parents about their own lottery day in their youth.

All comments, questions, and suggestions are heard and appreciated.