THE FUTURE
(Published in the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter, January 2005)

One thing is certain: no one can predict the future! While this sounds obvious, people behave as if they can foretell what lies ahead. In reality, the world moves forward in accidental, serendipitous, and random ways. If one looks at the contents of “time-capsules” that people left behind with instructions to be opened 100 years in the future, what one finds are predictions that are wildly off base. And many major scientific breakthroughs often occur serendipitously during a search for unrelated scientific truths.

Fifty years ago no one had any notion of the home computer, a technological advancement which influences things we do almost every minute of every day. One small aspect of the computer revolution is how the lives of seniors have been enhanced. The elderly, who often live alone and have limited ability to move around, have enormously enriched lives now because of their in-home access to e-mail and the Internet. Do you think that Dell or Apple had any inkling years ago that the market for personal computers would be so huge for the senior population?

Back in the 1800’s, before recording devices existed, if people went to a concert, they would hear a performance of a piece of music that they would likely never hear again, regardless of how much they enjoyed listening to that piece of music. This week my son bought an I-Pod, which has the capability of holding 5000 songs of his choosing in its memory. In a little mechanism smaller than his wallet where he can listen to music over and over again wherever and whenever he chooses. Find me an article from a couple of decades ago that foretold of such an innovation.

We are even less capable of controlling our future than we are of predicting it. Did you really control how you met the person who is your life partner? Did you really have control over the specific job offer that has led to so much of what you do everyday? Of course the most accidental and unpredictable of all things is whether or not you were even born in the first place. Think about all the couplings of people that had to occur in your ancestors exactly at the right moment, leading up to the existence of your parents, and then the precise egg and sperm that had to unite to form you. Talk about overcoming extreme odds.

Perhaps life is best lived without excessive regard to trying to control what is going to happen in the future. In other words, try to live in the present. Some future planning obviously makes sense, but what you are going to be doing five years from now, let alone what happens to you tomorrow, may be a lot less predictable and a lot less in your control than you think.