In a thousand years archaeologists will dig up tanning beds and think we fried people as punishment.

The line is a darkly comic thought experiment about how everyday technologies can look barbaric when stripped of their cultural context. By imagining future archaeologists misreading tanning beds as instruments of punishment, Wilde highlights the strangeness of contemporary beauty practices—especially those involving risk (UV exposure) in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal. The joke also points to the limits of historical inference: material artifacts alone can invite wildly incorrect narratives. Beneath the humor is a critique of how normalized self-harm-adjacent routines can become, and how future moral standards may judge present-day vanity and consumer culture as cruel or irrational.