Today is August 5, 2026, The “day after”. I came home from a long, physically exhausting day at work, scrolled through “the socialz,” and everyone was talking about the same thing: Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
Jason Snell pointed out that the irony of setting up Home Assistant in his house today was not lost on him. Then I saw a few more posts referencing the story, and I realized I had no idea what any of them were talking about. So I went looking.
In the version published in The Martian Chronicles, it’s titled “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains,” and it follows a fully automated smart house going about its daily routine on August 4, 2026, ending with a lone surviving wall repeating “Today is August 5, 2026” into the ruins. Bradbury borrowed the title from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem, written during World War I and the flu pandemic, about how nature would carry on just fine without us.
I found a reading of it by Leonard Nimoy (Yes, that Leonard Nimoy) on YouTube, originally released on Caedmon Records back in 1975. I listened to the whole thing, every depressing second of it. It left me feeling sad because it reminded me that humanity can produce beauty, and yet so often we choose not to.
The scene that stuck with me the most was the side of the house where the paint had been burned away except for five silhouettes: a man mowing the lawn, a woman bending to pick flowers, and two children reaching up toward a ball that never came down. Everyday life, etched in paint and outlined in ash. Cheer, joy, happiness…. a snapshot of their final moments.
At the risk of sounding more pessimistic, remember that tomorrow is promised to no one. Instead of just feeling sad about that, I want to actually do something with it.
- Live today like it counts, because it might be the only one we get.
- Enjoy the mundane moments. The dishes, the commute, the small talk. That’s most of life.
- Make a real, intentional effort to make our own lives better.
- Then turn around and make someone else’s life better too.
It’s easy to turn on the news and see nothing but gut-wrenching events happening around the world. But we are the reason the good and the bad happen. It’s easy to sit back, do nothing, and let life pass us by, but resist.
The great stuff in life is the hard stuff. If everyone on the planet could throw a 100 mile an hour fastball into the strike zone, nobody would care. It’s impressive precisely because it’s hard and almost nobody can do it.
Every single one of us is good, really good, at something. Go show it off. Make someone’s day.
#RayBradbury #ShortStories