Back from the Future
I Wonder How They Lived in the Year 2019...
Yesterday was my sweetheart’s birthday and we celebrated with a brunch at the Freilichtmuseum and a visit to this dynamic historical museum. This is no dark museum with dusty exhibits. Instead, the museum is a living landscape—Freilichtmuseum translates to Open Air Museum.
Across 40 hectares, visitors can visit 60 historic buildings dating back from the 1500’s to the 20th century. These buildings have been removed from their original locations and put back together piece by piece on this land to serve as examples of the way people once lived here in northern Germany. The museum also has a working farm where there are heritage breeds of cows, sheep and goats, a steam-engine powered dairy and various functioning windmills and water mills located around the property.
Many of the buildings house workshops for different crafts, such as pottery, basket making, baking, and blacksmithing. Visitors can peek into these workshops and watch a woodturner working on a bedpost or a bowl, or a colorful design emerge from a weaver’s loom.
My favorite “exhibit” was the historic pharmacy, where we checked out the way medicines were made and distributed back in the day. The machinery looked sophisticated but the glass jars lined up on the shelves made me think of my dried herb collection back home—my medicine cabinet.
Outside, there was a giant medicinal plant garden; I had fun identifying familiar plants and then trying my best to pronounce their German names. Inside, bundles of dried herbs hung from the rafters. Something about seeing bundles of dried herbs makes me feel just right. I love the earthy smells and learning the knowledge embodied in the person who harvests them—when is right time to harvest, how best to preserve the herb for its medicinal value, and what ailment this medicine heals best.
My husband’s step-daughter and I, both plant enthusiasts, traded tips about our favorite herb blends. She’s a gardener, too, and preserves much of her harvest each season. We talked about how most of the medicinal plants that grow wild here in northern Germany are hard to come by in South Florida. What’s considered a weed here is green gold back home.
As we meandered our way around the widespread museum, I though about what a museum from our time might look like. In a few hundred years, how might our ancestors imagine life in the early 2000’s? This is obviously hypothetically speaking; with the way things are going, our species might not survive long enough to look back on these millennial years. But let’s say, for the sake of this thought experiment, that we do survive as a species and are able to look back into the past. How might our ancestors view society as it is today? Will they look back in anger, astonishment, or admiration?
What exhibits might they create to curate an image of our existence? A data center? A textile factory? A social media giant or a tech start-up? A marketing agency with a focus on digital strategy? How to explain the craft of "influencer" to humans of the future?
Our “crafts” are no longer of this world in the same way that weaving and basket making are. For much of society, our work is less and less physical and more and more digital. Of course, we still have pharmacies, but the inside of a CVS is much less picturesque than the pharmacy of old.
Still, there are still people who cling to craftsmanship, keeping old traditions of baking or cabinet-making alive. And there are those who apply the same dedicated principles of craftsmanship to their modern professions, whether that be as a manager at an ALDI or the producer of a podcast.
Please check out my most recent publication in SELF about taking a yearlong social media sabbatical.
Cheers!