Humor | Satire | Parenting
Step Back in Time and Visit This Authentic 2024 Family Home
Welcome, museumgoers. Please watch your step as you enter. You’ll notice that in 2024, it was considered fashionable to cover the entire floor of your home with loose LEGO bricks, so be careful you don’t hurt yourself.
We start in the kitchen, where the family seems to have eaten a diet composed entirely of cereal and potato chips, based on forensic analysis of the crumbs embedded in the floorboards. It’s funny, from the number of crumbs we found when we first began restoring the home, we assumed hundreds of rodents had inhabited it — but it turned out it was just two children and their parents.
Speaking of the children, notice their fingerprints on the walls, in assorted media ranging from paint to ketchup to their own bodily expectorations. This, we believe, was the 2024 version of cave drawings.
It was fascinating to explore the hall closet, which we emptied to create the exhibit you see in front of you. Note the 13 identical pairs of shoes in different sizes, which our anthropological psychologist tells us is likely to indicate that one of the children who lived in this house was “afraid of change.” You will see this hypothesis further supported when we reach the child’s bedroom and find evidence that even in the hottest heat of summer, he only wore long pants and sweatshirts. Astonishing.
Moving to what this family called the living room, note the continued motif of toys on the floor. It is interesting to note that in 2024 there were apparently no spaces in the home that were not completely dominated by the detritus of the children. From the crayons you will see littering the bathroom to the magnetic tile tower in the father’s office, it is as if traditional roles were reversed during this time in history and children exerted their dominant position in the family by occupying every last inch of space with their discarded belongings.
We will take a careful peek at the basement now. Please be careful — we cannot enter it fully due to the number of boxes that occupy the space as part of the original findings. We believe that this family was running a side business selling toilet paper to neighboring villagers or perhaps suffered from an undiagnosed digestive ailment.
As we approach the stairs, enjoy this exhibit of tangled electrical wires and computer peripherals. It is unclear whether this was intended to be sculptural art or if these mysterious parts could be combined to create a functional device with three external hard drives, four webcams, and a broken speaker. The truth is lost to history.
At the top of the staircase, find the father’s office, where he apparently worked as a professional solitaire player, based on an analysis of his computer activity. The mother worked outside the home as a hawker of old pretzels and used tissues, as indicated by what we discovered in her work bag.
It is believed, from the hundreds of books found in the home, that everyone who lived here read at a kindergarten reading level.
They also enjoyed hiding puzzle pieces around the home, most of which we are still searching for. In that spirit, rendering toys and games completely unplayable appears to have been the family’s main leisure activity, followed by drawing on the furniture and staining their clothing.
On your left, witness the family’s most prized possessions, a toppling stack of catalogs, political ads, offers for new credit cards, and grocery store circulars, which were found gloriously displayed on a table at the center of the home, apparently too sacred to ever be discarded.
Interestingly, despite the general disrepair of every object in the home, we found a pristine set of “wedding china” locked away in one cabinet, never used, while it appears the family mostly ate using their hands.
Please watch your step as you exit, past the exhibit of uncapped markers. It is a marvel to realize that the family that lived here was once considered human.
