The New Year has ambled in and made itself at home, decorations are packed away, the refrigerator leftovers are cleaned out, life is out there in the future. It is checking up on our resolve to do, to be, and to think better; to lose weight, to be kind to the homeless, to take our children to exciting places. How are we doing three weeks in?

I sometimes wonder about the difference between planning ahead and prediction. The first has always seemed to me like a wise strategy, though I confess I anticipate (worry?) a little more than I should. I have always enjoyed a comfortable amount of self-discipline and as an active Boy Scout when I was young, I took to heart the motto “Be Prepared.” It was probably pilfered from some ancient philosopher or Poor Richard though I didn’t know or care about that at the time. I knew that an extra pair of socks might come in handy when my others were soaked from wading through the trail’s creeks.

No one wants to be blind-sided, left in the dark, jerked around, or in the end humiliated. I reason that there is no downside to showing up early for appointments and meetings, or paying taxes, setting the table or getting out of bed, for that matter. My father was voted ‘Most Conscientious’ by his high school classmates. I am my father’s son.

Prediction, on the other hand, seems an ‘iffy’ concept. If science (mathematics) can calculate probable outcomes so accurately, why does the world get so much devastatingly wrong? Pandemics, wars, financial volatilities, famine, and so on are not simply ‘the nature of things,’ but blunders of human nature. [See Blunder: Why Smart People make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shore, 2008] In other words, why are smart people so dumb? Much can be blamed on misreading the past and refusing to comprehend its lessons and/or misunderstanding the present.

Trying to ‘see’ into the future is a fool’s errand regardless of predictive accuracy. This notion is a vast quagmire of theories and I couldn’t possibly explore them adequately here save to point out the myriad words in the English language that reference the future. Many are obvious: tomorrow, upcoming, impending, dream (in the sense of looking toward the future), promise, and anticipate. Much used these days is “going forward.” But there are many that can imply the future: plan, approach, unfold, destiny, kismet, someday. Some words clearly have to do with prediction: likely, probable, divine (augur), foresee, potential, and the Buddhist idea of karma. A few words seemly in past tense imply a future: scheduled, booked, and intended.

Fascinating as this wordlarking is, there are legitimate uses in looking to the future. Remember “Be Prepared”? A good example is weather forecasting. While not 100% correct in any given location, it is accurate enough to assist farmers in saving crops, for some warning of hurricanes and tornadoes, and perhaps if a scarf is needed on the morning walk. There are other future events which we can anticipate with the caveat that they may not happen: our next doctor’s appointment, mortgage payment, or yoga class. But we assume these things will happen as planned.

We seem to be an animal that is obsessed with the idea of prediction: in sports gambling, stock ‘futures,’ parsing political polls, chances of having THE lotto number, in award shows (Grammy, Oscars, etc.) and even poetry contests that we dream of winning. Political pundits are always talking about the future, sometimes having to eat their words, back-track, apologize (rare) or pick up cards of their collapsed house. A constant game of ‘what if?’

Many thinkers more informed than I have studied these ideas and have warnings of man/womankind’s direction. The list is long, but Yuval Noah Harrari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) (and his other books) and Michio Kaku’s The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny beyond Earth. (2018) immediately come to mind. A different, though perhaps related, genre is science fiction. I have not been a devotee of this sort of literature, but I don’t disparage the positive intellectual pretendings it engenders. There may be some goodness and value in such exercises.

There is a pessimistic side to the future which envisions societies of darkness, of ignorance, and suffering. We are in a decadence of dread these days: any notion of utopia seems out of reach. I can’t begin to summarize what AI will do to our sense of time, place, or being. AI cannot lose weight for us, be kind to the homeless, or supply serendipitous adventures for our children while visiting different places and sights. Our lives are artificial enough.

In many regards, we are fearful that the horrifying might happen. If we predict based on the present, we may be sure that the monsters in charge will exacerbate global warming, will continue the game of chaos, will promote violence in all its manifestations, and enjoy the resultant social disintegration. We can be sure of the eschatological event, the end of life as we know it. Unfortunately, most of us are tense about the future; future tense, as it were.

Is the antidote to this view of the future a skeptical hope practiced in the present tense?

Fred Wilbur has written in varied genres including essays and blogs, historical research, newspaper columns, magazine articles, book reviews, and book introductions. He has also published three volumes of poetry, and three how-to woodcarving instruction books. His poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise (Pine Row Press, 2025). The Nelson County Garden Club: The First Fifty Years, 1935-1985 was underwritten by the Nelson County Historical Society (2023).