There’s a good chance that you’re worried, right now, about what the future holds. I raise this in the context of next week’s election and Brexit, of course, but that situation’s hardly unique: many of us are always worried about what the future holds, in some domain – and still would be even if politics suddenly started going our way. Which makes this as good a time as any to recall what a strange emotion worry is. No matter how much badness is in store for you, once you’ve taken whatever precautions you can, worry is largely useless. In prehistory, when threats were immediate and physical, a surge of anxiety could motivate evasive action. But that’s not true of most modern worries, whether they’re political, environmental, related to your job, your relationship or your kids; instead, the anxiety just hangs around and feeds on itself. Honestly, it might be preferable just to have to outrun a sabre-toothed tiger every few weeks.
It’s interesting to consider the asymmetry in our feelings about the future versus the past. Looking ahead, life’s unpredictability maddens us, and we worry because we feel, if subconsciously, that doing so will help bring the future under our control. (Or we act hyper-cautiously, also in hopes of controlling the future: “Dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early,” reads an Onion headline, apparently inspired by my childhood.) Yet, looking backwards – and I know I risk sounding like I’ve been consuming substances derived from the leaf of the cannabis plant here – isn’t it odd that we’re untroubled by the zigzagging path of coincidence and unpredictability that brought us to this point?
“Sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement – why am I myself?” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. “What astonishes me… is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other… The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about.”
It’s no mystery that we should care more about the unpredictability of the future; the past, after all, is water under the bridge. What’s bizarre about the energy we invest in fretting about the future is that we should imagine we ever could have much control over, or knowledge of it, given how little we had in the past. Countless coincidences and blind historical forces made you who you are today. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume they’ll play an overwhelming role in what happens next? And doesn’t that drive home the fact that worrying about it can’t possibly be productive?
I don’t mean to imply you can reason yourself out of worry entirely. But there’s some liberation in realising the truth: when you worry, you’re demanding reassurance, yet this is something you’ll definitely never get from the future, for the simple reason that it hasn’t occurred yet. Certainly, it’s worth taking action in the present to increase the probability that things will go well. But that’s as far as your influence extends. In a profound sense, the future itself is none of your business.
Read this
In Back To Sanity, psychologist Steve Taylor argues that ‘elsewhereness’ – including mentally living in the future – is a mental disorder, from which it’s possible to escape.
