What Do We Talk About When We Talk About the Future?

"Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow.”
C.G. Jung

"Send your love/into the future
Send you love/into the distant dawn"
Sting

The subject of the future begins with what you bring to it. Your curiosity is likely fueled by feelings of fear or hope. Often by both.

In confronting the future, cynicism won’t get you very far. But a sense of irony and appreciation of paradox are helpful, if not mandatory.

The concern of the young for their future may be most natural and most vivid. But even the old, without much of a future of their own, can care deeply about the future, as legacy, but also selflessly.

So what is it? What do we talk about when we talk about the future?

“There is no such thing as the future: what there is instead is an almost infinite range of possible futures.”
Frederic Pohl

The future is a very big place. It’s everything that hasn’t happened yet, to everybody who is alive and will ever live, and more. Because we don’t know what actually will happen, the future from our perspective is everything that could happen, from the next nanosecond to the end of time. Everywhere.

Most senses of “the future” we normally consider are narrower than this, but this expanse of possibilities is the true context that sooner or later insists on itself.

So what do we talk about when we talk about the future? The future extends forward in time, and it expands outward from our individual selves.

There is the personal future, the one we think and dream about and plan for in our youth. Then there are the personal futures of partners, children and grandchildren.

Naturally these futures occur in a context: job markets, education options, culture and society, national and international economic conditions, war and peace, and so on. If at 20 years old we consider our personal future until retirement, we’re looking perhaps 50 years out. What will the future be like on the way to a half century ahead? The time span for children and grandchildren is longer—say 70 or 80 years from birth.

For a couple of centuries now, our society has experienced historically rapid change, including in all these areas that directly affect personal futures. For example, the specific occupations of both my grandfathers no longer exist, at least in the same way. My father started out selling and servicing sewing machines, out of a retail store that was part of a national chain specializing in them.  All that faded away before he was 45. One might even say that my working life as a freelance writer has largely disappeared, at least in its specifics. I was also an editor for alternative weekly newspapers, mostly new when I started in the 1970s, and vanishing fast in the early 21st century.

Many such changes were and are driven in large part by technology, but the past has proven that technologies can have immense and widespread social, cultural, economic and environmental effects. So as technologies continue to develop, we naturally wonder, what will the future be in a century or two? This is “the future” that intrigues, fascinates and frightens.

So the sense of “the future” in common parlance is somewhat open-ended but probably starts 50 years ahead and may extend for several centuries. I’m guessing that this is “the future” most people are curious about enough to read this far.

There are ways we narrow down the possibilities of those futures. In fact we have an accepted if unspoken standard for how the future comes to be. We’ll examine this key criterion a little later.

But even with limitations, there are lots of possible futures. Sometimes people are keenly interested in the future, even to the point that it’s real to them. And sometimes, they seem to ignore it.

As the 21st century speeds towards its third decade, it’s said that people don’t talk about the future because it’s already here or soon will be: the Internet, smartphones, social media, drones, robots, Virtual Reality, 3-D printing, the Internet of Things, as well as the technologies of medicine (including genetic manipulation and cloning) and so on.

Some argue that today’s information technologies and their effects— social networks, constant information, shrinking attention spans—have created such an overwhelming and ever-changing present that the future even as an idea is disappearing, if not entirely obsolete.

Or it’s said that people don’t talk about the future because there isn’t likely to be one worth talking about, or contemplating at all. Or because there’s no way to predict it, so why bother? Or because all prior talk of the future turned out to be nonsense. Where are the flying cars?

It’s even been suggested that thinking about the future is unnatural for humans, who care mostly if not only about the present.

But now as in all times, people do think, feel and talk about the future. The future is basic to how humans think, and may be in large measure why we think.

Clark's Nutcracker hides up to 30.000 seeds for
the winter, and locates them months later, even
under snow.  Photo by jrtrimble via Birdshare.

We know of animals that act in the present to create better conditions for their future survival, from ants to apes, and certain birds that hide seeds in summer to be retrieved and eaten in winter.

 Though it’s always perilous to speculate on early humans, it’s reasonable to assume that they observed the means of their survival (habits of prey, location of plants in particular seasons, etc.) and planned ahead based on those observations, and on the accumulated memories of their group. They thought about the future all the time.

Late 19th century philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley thought so.“Life being a process of decay and of continual repair and a struggle throughout against dangers," he wrote, "our thoughts, if we are to live, must mainly go the way of anticipation.”

“We register our perceptions and experiences with an eye to our future actions,” adds contemporary historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma in interpreting Bradley. “What happened in the past only matters inasmuch as it enables us to anticipate what lies in store for us.”

Being able to anticipate consciously, and to communicate information and ideas that helped people to anticipate better, were major advantage for humans, and may well have driven the development of language and culture as well as the development of the human brain.

The future early humans contemplated was likely limited in time and space, and probably dealt with anticipating seasonal and cyclical changes, signs of a changing environment as well as where prey animals and needed plants were most likely to be. But thinking about the future, far from being some exotic exercise of a few, may well be the most natural kind of thinking we do.

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