Thinking About the Future
It will come with zero surprise when I say that I worry about the future. (Unless, I guess, this is your first time reading my blog.) I worry about my future. I worry about the twins’ future. I worry about all 8 billion people on the planet, especially because I thought there were only 7 billion until I Googled that fact. I still remember when our minds were all blown because we hit 6 billion, and that wasn’t that long ago.
Anyway.
I am deeply curious about this upcoming book, Could Should Might Don’t, because it does not contain the word “will” in the title. As in, “AI will take our jobs.” A lot of my anxiety comes from believing the “will” repeated over and over again, about all possibilities. Maybe people think that it makes them sound more confident to put it in the definitive, but unless we are in control of the outcome (“I will walk out of the room if you don’t stop singing R.E.O. Speedwagon”), we should probably use “could” or “might.”
I’ve been trying to remember other times when the future felt so deeply uncertain and scary, including after 9-11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2016 election. While difficult times followed all of those events, things rarely turned out as predicted.
1 comment
OK, I’m really going to show my age, because I remember when the world reached 4 billion, and we were all shocked! (I was always aware of world events.)
You’re right – I think the world is a scary place right now. The world felt very uncertain when Andropov (a hawkish, former-KGB type) took over from Brezhnev (I was studying international relations at the time, and I still know where I was and what I was doing when I heard he had been appointed leader of the USSR), and when the pandemic was growing. 9-11 was shocking, but I didn’t feel as if reality was spinning out of control, and the same with most of the market crashes. But it feels like that now. And so I’m sending hugs, as I’m sure you acutely aware of it all, living where you do.