why is it difficult to imagine the future?

this whole business of trying to predict the future and the things that will happen is truly a fool’s errand. you ask any two people what their crazy prediction about the future is and they will all focus on some different aspect of life and incorporate some different philosophical lens based on whatever futurism thinkpiece they were most recently exposed to. there’s more noise than there’s ever been. and with all this noise you kinda have to choose your battles and choose what you worry about, and it’s no different for choosing which anxiety about the future that we end up fixating on.

visions of the future are guided by a sort of parable, i feel as if they typically involve the logical extreme of some contemporary phenomenon, manifested in all its grotesque horror and wreaking havoc on our otherwise fine and unchanged society. the future lives in the realm of our imagination, the same imagination in which lives all the fantasies ever told, and so the future becomes an instrument for inserting Relevance into a narrative.

is it any use to hypothesize about the future? to tell such cautionary tales? it’s as useful as any other story. arthur clarke says any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. and such is true for social innovation and cultural development. the experience of the future is one that will so thoroughly be beyond us, but stories of the future hold our hand as we begin to experience lifestyle changes that may otherwise overwhelm us. they are guidebooks for how to reconcile with change.