A quick look back through the decades will bring up the most fascinating future predictions about the present. A quick look online gives a scary amount of reasonably accurate predictions. These predictions are never exactly spot on of course but the ideas are usually in the right area. The man flying with use of mechanic wings is the jetpack, bubble cars that we don’t need to manually operate are self-drive cars and the ‘correspondence cinema‘ is like a clunky version of Skype. We seem a long way from having our own helicopters, we haven’t mastered telepathy or transportation, machines have still not liberated the workforce, we haven’t made it to Mars in person, not everyone is vegetarian and we’ve certainly not invented time travel. Curiously Nikola Tesla predicted that by now we would have given up stimulants such as tea, coffee and tobacco because of their harmful affects on the human body. You try telling that to the advertising executives and watch them laugh in your face. 2020 is quite often the year many of these predictions were made for, just realise you’re right now living in someone else’s future that they could never possibly have imagined.
Predicting must be fun though. It’s a job which you can’t fail at as long as you make predictions far enough beyond what you imagine will be your lifetime. These end-of-the-world cult leaders could probably learn something from that as their predicted date comes and goes. It is not just the crazy fanatics and the futurists of the past that make predictions though, it is you, me and everyone else on a daily basis. It never seems quite clear why we seem so determined to prophesise prospective future events but we seem to have made such a past time of it that it can often take up a fairly unequal proportion of out time. It is possible that we are living such miserable lives that it is this looking ahead that gives us hope of a brighter future, or we live with our heads in the clouds to the point that we forget that we are unable to actually live in these fantasy worlds we create.
The reality from these past predictions is clearly that while you may be able to imagine something similar to what may happen, at no point will it be possible to accurately predict events to come. Nothing ever works out as you imagine. We forget to live in the actual moment to the point that were the future to happen exactly as we predicted we probably wouldn’t even notice anyway as we would already have moved on to the another future. Failing that we get so obsessed with how we want the future to unfold and become so attached to the image in our heads that we are inevitably disappointed with whatever outcome actually happens. We waste so much time, life passes us by with all this predicting. Then one day you’re old but you never noticed as you were never really there to see it happen.
Observations and Misunderstandings 