If you want to measure the real speed of modern change, don’t look at the size and complexity of new headers or how Al is every student’s best friend. Look instead at the three oldest bits of civic infrastructure we all grew up with: the post office, the banknote and the landline. All three are being shut down in real time.
And the countries doing it aren’t fringe outliers – they’re the sensible, efficient northern democracies farmers usually point to when we want governments to get their act together: the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Finns, the Brits, the Kiwis and the Canadians.
Start with the mail.
Denmark has gone first. PostNord has set the date: December 30, 2025, will be the last day of letter delivery. After that, no more stamped envelopes, no more postman on a bike, no more universal mail service. Parcels survive because people still can’t get enough of Amazon, but the letter – that 200-year workhorse of civilization – is finished.
Greece is heading to the same destination. The Hellenic Post is shutting half its offices, and many regions have already lost regular letter delivery entirely.
New Zealand is next. With households receiving fewer than two letters a week, NZ Post has warned it can’t sustain letter delivery at all. It’s preparing to become a parcel-only business, with traditional post ending before the decade is out.
These aren’t efficiencies – they’re the collapse of a national service model. The cost of delivering a single stamped letter is now approaching $10 in parts of Europe. Nobody wants to pay it, so the system is being quietly unplugged.
Now look at the money in your pocket – what’s left of it. Cash is vanishing faster than envelopes.
Sweden is the first nation preparing to retire coins and banknotes entirely. Major banks no longer hold physical currency. Many shops refuse it. The Riksbank has mapped the final phase-out before 2030.
Norway is just behind. Only 3-4% of transactions are cash, ATMs are disappearing, and ministers are discussing the legal framework for ending physical currency.
Denmark and Finland are close. Both governments allow businesses to refuse cash. Finland is preparing to scrap mandatory cash-acceptance rules – once that goes, cash has no legal foothold.
Australia, as usual, is drifting along behind. Cash now represents just 13pc of payments and ATMs are vanishing by the week. The Reserve Bank is trialing a digital e-dollar. The direction of travel is obvious.
Then there’s the landline – the copper umbilical cord of the 20th Century.
The United Kingdom has set the countdown. On January 31, 2027, the entire copper PSTN will be switched off. Every landline dies on the same day. All voice calls will move to digital networks or VolP.
New Zealand is decommissioning its copper suburb by suburb, aiming to retire the lot by 2030.
Iceland has begun the final shutdown and will remove the last copper services by 2028.
Across Europe and Asia – Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and the UAE – the old copper network is being ripped out as decisively as letters and cash.
And before anyone asks – no, the United States isn’t on this list. Trump, who lives in the 1950s, doesn’t like change. The US Postal Service can’t legally shut down letters, so it just bleeds billions while first-class mail dies on its feet. Cash is still king in half the country, and any talk of a digital dollar turns into a congressional food fight. And the copper landline? America still has tens of millions of them, with no national switch-off date in sight.
While Scandinavia and New Zealand unplug the analogue world, the US lumbers along with one foot in the 1970s and the other in Silicon Valley.
Put this together and you can see what’s coming.
Soon the local post office in your country town will go the same way as the banks – which means the children born from 2025 to 2035, what demographers call Generation Beta, will grow up in a world where three of the most familiar objects of the past century simply don’t exist.
No post-boxes. No coins. No dial tone. Show them a photograph of a post office and they’ll think it’s a railway museum. Hand them a $20 note and they’ll assume it’s Monopoly money. Put an old dial phone in front of them and they’ll ask where the screen went.
The digital replacements are faster, cheaper and more efficient – until they aren’t.
When the fibre drops out, when the app crashes, when the algorithm glitches, everything stops. There is no analogue backup anymore.
That’s the world Generation Beta will inherit: frictionless, wireless, cashless, trackable, instant – and wide open to massive disruption when someone hacks the whole system.
Still, who would go back to the good old days. I wouldn’t!
