Millennials revisit scarily accurate predictions made 13 years ago about life in 2020

One of Conan O’Brien’s funniest Late Night bits was a long-running and reliably absurd sketch called "In the Year 2000." For decades, crossing over into the "new millennium" had sounded like the stuff of science fiction, with people envisioning all sorts of technological and societal leaps. And despite first appearing in the 1990s, O’Brien’s segment was given the feel of a space-age melodrama, with the host and his trusted sidekick, Andy Richter, making increasingly dumb predictions about our bold new future.

With that temporal milestone now in the rear view, people have been forced to push their daydreaming to some other round number. Thirteen years ago, for the bored denizens of the Internet, that target happened to be 2020. What changes—both positive and negative—would be in store for us then?

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Weirdly on-point predictions for 2020 life

On Reddit, one user started the following thread: "My friend and I were placing bets on our predictions for the year 2020. Reddit, what are your legitimate, realistic predictions for the 2020s?"

Over 3,000 replies rolled in, as commenters weighed in on everything from airport security to marijuana legalization to whether or not Ted Mosby had managed to meet his children’s long-teased mother. In an interesting twist, that same thread has now gone viral again—this time in the /Millennials subreddit, with people looking back at these predictions as a kind of Internet time capsule, highlighting a handful that are scarily accurate.

User maldio chimed in with the eerily on-point guess that "Google will become self-aware and know everything about us." (If we were to do this same exercise now, looking 13 years into our future, what would the updated prediction be? Shudder.) Redditor thelovepirate correctly guessed that both Bob Barker and Betty White would still be alive. (Both lived until age 99, with White dying in 2021 and Barker in 2023.)

ElectricDumpling weighed in with a few interesting projections about technology and pop culture, including the prevalence of people saying "Like if you’re a 00’s kid" and the continued expansion of "hologram concerts." Meanwhile, michaelti wrote that "everything in the dollar store now costs $2." (As NPR notes, Dollar Tree had already increased prices from $1 to $1.25 in 2021; in March 2025, The US Sun explained that some items had been raised even higher, reportedly due to tariffs and rising costs.)

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From technology to religion

But the most startling predictions came from user FoodIsProblematic. It’s worth looking at their list in full:

• Solid-state storage in 90+% of all new computers
• Most media will be streaming; the DVD will be on its last legs
• Most transactions will happen by cell phone; most people under age 20 will choose not to carry cash
• Battery capacity will at least quadruple
• Police will increasingly monitor communities with CCTV and flying drones
• You will not be able to opt out of airport body scans; the TSA will begin setting up checkpoints at train and bus stations
• Biometric ID will be required for all new US passports, and most driver's licenses will contain RFID chips
• 70+% of all books sold will be electronic
• Phone companies will stop delivering phone books except by request
• 25% of Americans, and 45% of Americans aged 30 and under, will acknowledge being unaffiliated with any religion

Of course, not all of these have come true, and some of them are only partly accurate. Still, it’s incredible how spot-on they were on average—predicting the rise of cell-phone payment transactions (even if cash, for many, remains king) and solid-state drives, along with the continued cultural vanishing act of DVDs. They also more or less nailed the prediction about religion: The latest Pew Research Center data shows that 28% of Americans consider themselves "religiously unaffiliated," with 41% identifying as "Protestant," 19% as Catholic, and 10% as another faith.

See you in another 13 years.

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