Trading in Our Futures

When I was a kid, it was impossible for me to really imagine myself beyond a small window of time. Perhaps 3 or 4 months down the road. This, of course, did not stop me from playing imagination with the future. Entering middle school was exciting because the way we changed classes every 45 minutes, to me, fulfilled the ability to pretend I was more grown up than I was. I would pretend to be older, but only by a little bit, and I contented myself with this. Similarly, I was uncertain that the future would really exist. I remember, in the 5^th grade, being genuinely afraid that the world would end with the start of Y2K and that I'd never be a “grown-up.” I could only look a little bit down the road and, at the same time, I was always convinced that the end of the road was only slightly beyond that. Fatalism strikes the young mind in very terrifying ways, but it does far more damage to the mind that is declared to be matured.

The future is part and parcel of the way we conceive of our lives now in every respect. I cannot be certain that this was any different in times gone by, but the future does seem to have a remarkable place in the way we conceive of ourselves and our livelihoods. The obvious example is the forecasting that takes place in our stock markets. We trade on futures, anticipations of what things will look like- what people will want. The present is not really the main concern unless it directly reveals a potential glimpse into what things will look like down the road. Perhaps another way the future has become our time period of operation is in the way the past is obscured. The past is often employed to predict the future, as many use the discipline of history as a predictive tool, forgetting that we often interpret the past only in terms of a provincial present.

And fear is always cloaked about the future. We anxiously await the time China is predicted to finally overtake the US as the world's largest economy assuming that, with that moment, something fundamentally American will vanish. If being the largest economy is so integral to being American, then yes, our identities as Americans shall be washed away and rightfully so. Nothing so shallow should be so vital to our collective identities (whatever they may be). The future is what we look to for our guidance and it holds all of our deepest fears. Some of these fears are certainly warranted- we carry on demanding sight of the future without taking notice of all the dangers that we have engendered ourselves. And now, we look at the future and cannot escape from a certain amount of dread. We have been undone and the decline now begins.

I don't see escape from this mentality being simple in any respect. Thinking of the possibilities that come with crisis is not so hard when we are so convinced that we are about to lose everything that makes us, well, us. Perhaps we have failed to look at the present with any degree of care to the point that we no longer recognize ourselves as people living in the moment. We only see decay around the corner with no notion of what will persist beyond that point.

All of this presumes that we are in fact on a path of impending decline- its fatalistic. There are many, many voices- rational or otherwise- that have always insisted that this is the place we would end up going. Even I, in high school, thought in terms of this fatalism about the United States. I avidly read things by Noam Chomsky, for example, with this absolute certainty that everything he said was fundamentally correct. I spent my senior year writing a 38 page paper on the parallels between ancient empires and the United States (which, today, looks like nothing more than a trite exercise) that concluded with the declaration that all empires fall. And they do. But I really don't think that back then I was ever really convinced that I would see this decline in my lifetime.

Maybe I'm not convinced of it now. In any event, I think people do really hope that what we are experiencing now is just a natural cycle in the way our economy works and that prosperity and progress, as we defined it before, shall return to us. Yet there are others who predict and utterly grim and total collapse of the world as we know it, replaced by something else. We look to the future and assume it is directing this present we now exist in. The future is at once uncertain and determining with our present selves prostrate before it. This is part of why we feel such anxiety about our material life and why we cannot constructively imagine ourselves beyond the next six months.

I have written this post completely laced with a kind of fatalism. I think, like many people, I want to be able to have a confidence that everything is going to be alright. But what I would define as “alright” is not entirely clear. Perhaps comfort materially and mentally is all I require to feel as though things are “alright.” Maybe we need to jettison our dependence on the future in favor of understanding the present. Rather than building ourselves towards some expected future we must become more reactionary to the events of the present. We're going to give ourselves Paris Syndrome when it comes to the future, and that would really cripple our collective confidence.

Things may get much, much worse in the near future. I, and everyone else, have no choice but to live with that prospect. Things may get much better in the near future, as well. We cannot passively await that possibility. The more I think about it, the more I think we have handed our agency on to something that may or may not exist in the form we imagine it.

Nothing here is serious scholarship or spoken with any degree of confidence in the complexities behind what we are experiencing now. Its spoken through the mind of someone who still wrestles with the uncertainty and fatalism of a kid who just worried about to much as well as the mind of someone who truly believes things must change because the way people behave and think today has become very unsettling.