3

What Happens To Businesses? What About Politics?

Imagine you're a small business owner. Let's say it's a sandwich shop. The world always needs more of those. Then the snap happens.

2

Insurance Prices Are Going To Skyrocket

Life insurance policies are like wetting the bed -- something that you don't really want your parents to bring up to you as a kid, only worry about when you're drunk in your 20s, and eventually accept in old age.

But everyone who lost a loved one (read: breadwinner) in the family is going to have made some kind of claim after the snap. But what happens when they all come back? Do those claims have to be refunded? How do we tell what's fraud and what isn't? Do they get to keep the grief jet ski they bought?

Worse, since the snap is a catastrophe that has happened once, and we've now established that time travel exists, an already-cautious industry known for gouging the general public is going to freak out. If it's happened once, it could happen again, which means insurance companies are going to want to be prepared for it.

Walt Disney StudiosAnd these are companies that have already adjusted prices to the reality that aliens might level half of Manhattan on any given day.

Well, the way insurance companies are going to be inclined to handle the threat of another snap is going to be to raise prices. Those ads on daytime game shows telling old people about it costing as little as $0.25 a day? Say goodbye to that kind of pricing.

1

The Five-Year Age Difference Is Going To Mess Up Every Type Of Relationship You Can Conceive Of

There's a five-year gap between the two snaps, and the aftermath of the return snap kind of gets glossed over. But think about it: For half of all people, five years have passed, while for the other half, no time has passed at all. We get a glimpse of the implications of this in the subplot of Ant-Man, who gets freed from the Quantum Realm after five years which are only five hours for him, but the weirdness of his tiny daughter now being an adolescent is mostly skipped.

We view the family snap situation mostly through the vantage point of Hawkeye. He gets his family back and they can pick things up right where they left off. After all, to his wife and children, the jump from Hawkeye being an early 40s white guy with dad hair to a mid-40s white guy with a skater hawk and tattoos is pretty negligible. (Maybe he listens to metal and drinks more Red Bull now, but that's pretty much it.) But for most people, there are a lot of interpersonal relationships where those five years mean everything.

Imagine you're a 13-year-old boy with an 11-year-old younger brother, and then you're snapped. Well bam, now you're back, and that booger-eating nerd is the one driving you to basketball practice and telling you what kissing girls is like. The fundamental nature of your entire relationship has been changed forever. Or take a high school couple that is madly in love, but then the snap and snap (remix) happen. Now one of those high-schoolers is halfway through college and stuck explaining statutory rape laws to a very confused and heartbroken 15-year-old.

Really, we could do this all day. There's the woman who got dusted on her wedding day, only to get snapped into a new world in which her fiance married her maid of honor, and she gets to learn this while still wearing her wedding dress. There are the senior citizens who are snapped back into existence, only to find that their entire social group has mentally deteriorated or died from the olds. There's even the baby who for the first five years of their life only knew a mom, when suddenly some dude shows up saying he's their dad ... actually wait, that last one sounds pretty good. (Dad, please come home.)