Future Words

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Leisure & Play

Schlockjoy

(n.)

The deliberate, unashamed enjoyment of content with no intellectual value, chosen precisely because it demands nothing.

Their Friday night schlockjoy ritual is a delivery pizza and a low-budget shark movie.

Does it ring true?

From the future, or already here?

Coinage notes

Schlock (Yiddish for cheap, shoddy goods) welded to joy. The pleasure is in choosing a guilty pleasure without any guilt: you know there are better options that you “should” consume, but you reach for the junk on purpose.

TECHNOLOGY

Sloptimism

(n.)
A defiantly optimistic embrace of AI-generated “slop,” grounded in the faith that genuinely important new forms of culture will emerge from it.

LEISURE & PLAY

Reelism

(n.)
The unrealistic expectation that real life should move with the pace, polish and payoff of a social media reel.

FUTURE INSULTS

Scantankerous

(adj.)
The cranky, short-fused mood that builds as endless skimming of feeds, inboxes and notifications wears you thin.
Future Words book cover

There are 99 more where this came from.

Future Words: A Non-Obvious Glossary of Terms That Don’t Exist (But Soon Will) collects all 100, each with its example sentence and coinage notes, from the bestselling authors of The Future Normal. Hardcover, October 20, 2026.

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