Let's Look into Your Future

"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 AD - 180 AD)

Many people fear the future, mostly because it's unknown and they fear that which is not familiar to them. Anything unknown, they learned somewhere, should be feared, or at least faced with apprehension.

Some look with trepidation to the future because they see the present being so much worse than the past they knew and are concerned that the conditions of today will only get worse in the future. ("I wouldn't want to have to raise kids today.")

What they fail to realize is that in their younger years they were relatively ignorant of the conditions of the world of their time. As we get older we gain a broader perspective of many things in life, whereas when we are younger we focus more on our immediate present.

This condition even exists with vision, where younger people can focus better on specific objects in the distance, but not so well the whole scene, whereas older people can take in a larger picture and assess the overall conditions better but may not be able to see specifics as easily. For example, kids can find Waldo in the Where's Waldo puzzles far easier than older adults.

A few people don't want to think about the future because they imagine that it will bring more of the pain they have suffered in the past and they are not certain they can tolerate any more. Those people may not consider the good parts of their past, thus see little possibility of a balance between good and bad in their future. The good was there, but they allow the bad to overwhelm them, so they believe the future will be equally as bad.

The future is neither good nor bad, not any more so than the past. We tend to remember that which impacts our emotions most, especially the negative emotions, and forget (most of the time) the good times we experienced. Our memories of good experiences may not be as vivid as those of the bad ones. At least not until we have lived long enough to be able to look back more than 40 years into our own past.