The Future Is Unknowable

Humans may be the only species that can imagine an unknown future. But that doesn’t mean we’re any good at it.

We’re routinely wrong about which career we’ll choose, where we’ll end up moving and whom we’ll wind up loving. We fail even more miserably when we try to predict the outcomes of national and global events. Like meteorologists trying to gauge the weather more than a few days out, we just can’t anticipate all the variables and butterfly effects.

In a landmark study, the psychologist Philip Tetlock evaluated several decades of predictions about political and economic events. He found that “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Although skilled forecasters were much better, they couldn’t see around corners. No one could foresee that a driver’s wrong turn would put Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an assassin’s path, precipitating World War I.

Yet a hunch about the future can feel like a certainty because the present is so overwhelmingly, well, present. It’s staring us in the face. Especially in times of great anxiety, it can be all too tempting — and all too dangerous — to convince ourselves the future is just as visible.

Acknowledging that the future is unknowable can bring some comfort when it feels as if the world is shattered. It can also offer a dose of humility sorely needed in a chaotic world, in which new technologies such as artificial intelligence accelerate the pace of change and make its effects that much harder to guess. Even the Cassandras who manage to anticipate extreme events are usually lucky, not smart; they tend to overweight unlikely scenarios and miss the mark on probable outcomes.

Our struggles to predict the future aren’t limited to events. They apply to our feelings, too. In the heat of the moment, we overindex on our anguish today and underestimate our capacity to adapt tomorrow.

Pain and sorrow are never permanent. They evolve over time, and ideally they help us make sense, find meaning and fuel change. As the author and podcaster Nora McInerny put it, “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.”

Ambiguous loss is not a funeral. It’s a reckoning. Like touching a hot stove, it hurts so we don’t miss its lessons. Anxiety about what comes next can help jolt us out of complacency.

It’s unsettling to realize we have no power to predict the future, because it means we aren’t in control of our fate. At the best of times, that can leave us holding our breath. But in the worst of times, embracing uncertainty proves liberating. It reminds us how quickly our fortune can change.