Contemporary Time Travel: A Guide

A travel guide to a vanishing, and emerging, world

You wake up, walk to a cafe, and buy a newspaper and a coffee. You pull out cash, pay for the items, and receive coins as change. You walk across the street to the post office, where you send a letter to your uncle, wishing him a happy birthday. You wave to a taxi, which takes you to a friend’s house.

For the last 100 years, this would be a totally normal, unremarkable day.

In 10 years, it may be almost impossible.

This is a travel guide to a vanishing world.

This is contemporary time travel.

I’ve been obsessed with time for years, which is not unusual—artists and writers have always been obsessed with time.¹

What’s unusual is where we are standing in history.

We are moving from a material world into an immaterial one.

The penny is no longer minted, and almost all transactions are digital now. Letter writing is not just dying, Denmark’s postal service no longer even delivers letters. Shopping malls in mid-tier cities have collapsed. The US had 2500 malls in the 1980s, and around 700 today, with numbers continuing to fall. A rapidly increasing minority of restaurants have no printed menu, and require a smartphone to order. Paying for parking is increasingly digital only. Many businesses, especially in China, refuse to accept cash. The Farmer’s Almanac, printed for over 200 years, is ceasing print production. 40% of local American newspapers have vanished. Encyclopedia Britannica stopped publishing paper versions in 2012. Phone books are nearly gone. “Mainline” Christianity is fading, with the Presbyterian Church (USA) alone closing nearly 3,000 churches since 1994. Taxis that aren’t smartphone based are dying. The shape of life as we know it is changing.

This photo was taken in 2026, not 1976.

And let’s not forget what we’ve already lost in the last decade: Video rental stores, most record stores, the fax machine, phone booths, and more.

A world of cash, letters, in-store shopping, newspapers, churches and books is fading before our very eyes. This is not to say all these changes are bad—I like the convenience of digital payments, and taxis before Uber were mostly unpleasant—but it is to say that the world we are moving to will be different in meaningful ways.

So, what should be done?

At a societal level, I think we should preserve cash for resilience and privacy purposes (a world of digital only payments is vulnerable to power outages and possibly cyber attacks). If people value printed newspapers, they should subscribe to them, while they still can. Record stores mostly died but vinyl sales bounced back. What people purchase at a mass scale matters.

But this article isn’t about a societal level response. It is about your personal response to a rapidly changing world.

It is called contemporary time travel because there are pockets of our past (and future) scattered everywhere, and you can travel to them, if you know where to look.

Here are some places you can visit, still, which are evocative of other eras.

These examples are not exhaustive and lean heavily American, but range from visiting a classic Pizza Hut to traveling to North Korea.

Catch a Glimpse of 1950s America by visiting a “Mainline” Church

Martin Luther King Jr.’s message carried not just the moral weight of right and wrong, but a distinctly Christian message that appealed to a nation that was overwhelmingly religious, that had communities where churches played an important social and moral role. This was never perfect—Churches were often essentially segregated—but it is likely that the organizing and community aspect of mass church attendance fostered a closeness between neighbors which has now faded.

As mentioned earlier, church attendance is falling, even if there is a slight revival, with “mainline” or liberal Christianity rapidly declining in numbers. Christian belief was once a bipartisan fact of life in America. Today, it is increasingly the province of right-wingers. Visiting a “mainline” Church is a rewarding experience, and, if you grew up with the concept that Christianity was just a hard-right belief system, going to such a church may challenge your beliefs in a good way. Even if you are totally atheist, seeing a religious practice that has survived for 2,000 years (in various forms) is certainly a method of contemporary time travel.

Visit the 1960s by visiting a classic Pizza Hut

This picture looks like the 1990s or earlier, but it was taken in 2026. Scattered across America are some Pizza Huts with the original interiors, original red roof architecture, and even some with salad bars or buffets.

If you look carefully at the image, you’ll see a QR code, which is a tell that some small elements have been updated. But everything down to the fonts to the seats to the chandeliers appeared so classic that my father and mother said it reminded them of the 60s and 70s.

So, how can you visit them? I found out about this location from Reddit, but while writing this post discovered what appears to be a total list from another Substack! Check out The Retrologist by Rolando Pujol ‘s post on Pizza Hut Classics here.

Visit 1960s -1980s Communist Countries

North Korea + Cuba

In 2013 I visited North Korea. The mostly Chinese tourists who I went with said the country reminded them of their Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). I was interested primarily in seeing what the Cold War was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain. North Korea, and perhaps Cuba, are some of the last surviving examples of a political system and ideology which has largely disappeared, in practice if not in name. (China and Vietnam are still communist, but in a very different way than in the past.)

This art was hand painted, which is another throwback to a bygone era before digital parts and printers made that a rarity, and not the norm.

Kaesong, where loudspeakers blared propaganda, and the road to the city featured tractors which appeared to be from the 1920s. In Nanpo we stayed in an old Korean house which seemed to be pre-Korean War, and was slightly crumbling, but very interesting.

Pyongyang, 2013.

Visiting Cuba is another famous way to visit the past, although I have never been so I won’t write too much more about that in this specific post, although the cars and architecture certainly have a distinctive flair.

Visit 1980s-early 2000s USA

Go to a mid-tier shopping mall, or department store, before it dies

Shopping malls are in serious decline, although malls in major cities appear to be somewhat safe. But the numbers, as discussed earlier, are a huge decline from 2,500 malls to perhaps 700 some today, with more closures expected.

These photos are from 2022. I went back to this mall just after Christmas in 2025 and found out the entire mall was closed. What was once a SEARS is now a Home Depot, while the rest of the mall appears to be empty. There is a lone Belk which has apparently survived only because it owns its own shopping space.

What is so shocking is that, for people who were young from the 1980s to the early 2000s, shopping malls were for many, the focal point of youth culture. Some of this was a creation of Hollywood, but malls really were a place to hang out. They were air conditioned, pretty safe, and offered a wide selection of goods.

I can’t say I loved hanging out at malls, but as with the loss of mainline churches, it is undeniable that the lack of spaces to visit, hang out, and have shared cultural references is a major change.

It’s also worth noting how liminal a decaying mall is.

Visit the last Blockbuster Video in Oregon

The last Blockbuster is a good case in point about nostalgia and contemporary time travel. Nostalgia will allow some things to survive, but nostalgia fundamentally changes the experience. The last Blockbuster video in Bend, Oregon has been transformed into a tourist version of what it used to be. It’s technically a video store, but it only survives based on merchandise, which accounts for 80% of its revenue.

Likewise, you can still ride in a horse drawn carriage in New York City—but only as part of a tourist attraction near Central Park. A form of transportation which was used for thousands of years is now a nostalgia play.

That’s a reminder that, for letters and newspapers, sure there may be a way to send or read them in 20 years, but it won’t be anything as common as it is today, or was even a decade ago.

Visit 2030s America: Take a Waymo or Self Driving Taxi

Self driving cars will revolutionize society, hopefully greatly increasing safety but possibly further atomizing society as it becomes normal to travel and shop with no human interaction.

In any event, self driving cars are not yet widespread in the world. To see the future which will soon come, visit San Francisco and take a Waymo.

See 2030s payments, convenience, and security, today— visit China.

Everything is paid for with QR codes. Cash is vanishingly rare. New cars are mostly electric. Deliveries are extremely fast. Everything is tracked, monitored, safe. On a recent visit to Shanghai I found a city increasingly devoid of trash, with people quite polite and most parts very clean. Part of this is the fact I stayed in the center of the city—but these changes are coming around the world. Facial recognition and automated tracking may lead to a reduction in crime as privacy disappears. Cash may go too. Things may be “better” overall, but they will be different.

So - where have you visited that feels like the past, or a window into the future? From Amish country to Monasteries, there are plenty of places not covered here. Let us know in the comments, I’d love to talk about your own contemporary time travel experiences. And if you haven’t yet, maybe start with a newspaper and a letter.

Other Resources by Poetry Culture:

The Quiet CV: A workbook and framework to rediscover what you value about your own life.

Year End Reset: A series on resetting your expectations and life.

Connected: A workbook about connection, included free with a paid membership.

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btw… here’s a playlist that kinda sounds how contemporary time travel feels… to me at least.

1. I pitched this idea to the NYT in like 2018 and got a polite rejection, (Mental Floss too) and wrote a less specific version of it based on memories in 2024.