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Not long ago, my six-year-old son was in the bath, building cities out of colorful foam blocks. (“City blocks!” he said. “Get it?”) One metropolis, on the tub’s outside edge, was supposed to be based in the present day; another, closer to the wall, was a future city. A third was constructed on a purple rectangle that floated in the water. “What’s that one, on the purple island?” I asked.
“It’s a fresent city,” he said. “It’s in between the future and the present.”
The fresent—does that sound like a nice place to be? To my ears, it registers as possibly exciting but also as frenzied and unpleasant. Yet I often feel that I’m living in the fresent. On a typical afternoon, at 2 P.M., I’m aware that I have a Zoom call coming up, and then an urgent e-mail to write, and then dinner to make at home, and then the kids’ bedtimes to navigate, and then a few more paragraphs to draft, and the concluding chapter of a thriller to finish reading before bed; I also know that I have a reference letter to compose over the weekend, a column to plan for next week, and a book due in a few months’ time. My days are saturated with a consciousness of the future, and unfold like ongoing reactions to what’s to come.
Technology is a culprit, because it transforms the present into a waiting game. My phone says that rain will start in fifteen minutes, Netflix tells me that the new “Wallace & Gromit” movie will soon be available, and a light on the car’s dashboard warns that maintenance will be required “soon.” This stream of notifications leaves traces behind on my future timeline. But I suspect that I’d dwell in the fresent even when unplugged, simply by disposition: my imagination projects itself more forward than backward. There have always been thinkers who’ve argued that the past, present, and future are basically constructs of the mind; Augustine, for example, believed they were mental categories created to help us comprehend change. Although we say that we experience a present, it’s likely true that “ ‘now’ arises again and again only because we say ‘now’ again and again,” Alan Burdick writes, in an overview of the concept of time published in this magazine. By the same token, however, one might get in the habit of saying “and then?” again and again. Apparently, I’ve rotated my mind, like a satellite dish, toward the future by default.
The future, in itself, exerts an attractive force—not just the general future, with its bland procession of potential events, but the futuristic future, with its alluring, fascinating, and forbidding narrative turns. A.I. looms, along with drones and robots, clones and climate change; if a bird-flu pandemic arrives, we’ll need new vaccines, and if Elon Musk’s Neuralink progresses further we may someday have chips in our heads. Will all this happen in twenty years, or ten, or two? Or are other, stranger possibilities likely to intrude? The political future, clearly, is studded with alarming milestones; the philosophy of longtermism suggests that we should also be concerned with problems that might plague our far-future descendants, from rising seas to the appearance of a global totalitarian surveillance state. (“The eyes of all future generations are upon you,” Greta Thunberg warns.) Meanwhile, our personal futures are maps with waypoints we’ve charted but may miss—college, marriage, work, family, retirement, and everything else we picture for ourselves.
The future, in short, is overstuffed, full of elements that demand our attention, perhaps legitimately, maybe too much. In his book “Time Surfing: The Zen Approach to Keeping Time on Your Side,” Paul Loomans, a Zen monk and a time-management coach in Amsterdam, describes a seven-point method for resisting the “time pressure” created by a densely packed, onrushing future seeking to cram itself into the present. Essentially, he advocates allocating your time intuitively; instead of living a hectic, overscheduled life, you do what strikes you as worthwhile now, dwelling with the single task or person in front of you, and trusting that what matters to you most will also matter to you organically, in the passage of time.
“Push out from shore and surf through time using trust and intuition as your guide,” Loomans writes. But this eminently valid advice, meant to apply to the personal side of life, sits uneasily alongside the equally reasonable view that we live too much in the present, ignoring the future toward which we’re careening both as individuals and as a civilization. It’s as though the present and the future are at war. This exact scenario is dramatized, to bewildering but fascinating effect, in Christopher Nolan’s movie “Tenet.” I had to watch it a few times before I realized that I liked it, in part, because of how well it evoked my own desire to resist the invasion of the future into my life. It’s a paradoxical desire, of course, because the future that I might wish to evade or resist is my own.
There are many aspects of life that pull us in opposing directions. We need to be pessimistic enough to prepare for bad outcomes but optimistic enough to undertake new projects. We need to see people both as enmeshed in systems that push them around and as free agents shaping their own lives. It’s vital to be skeptical and ask questions, but also to recognize the limits of what you can discover for yourself and trust in received wisdom. Similarly, it’s important to think constantly about the future while finding space to live in the present. But this balancing act grows more difficult in a semi-dystopian, science-fiction-tinged, media-saturated society, in which the future always seems to be becoming more salient, visible, lurid, exciting, and imminent. We’re used to thinking about how the weight of history shapes our culture, our politics, our psyches, but the future has weight, too—perhaps, these days, a growing weight.
It helps, I’ve found, to cultivate a few different visions of the future. Over the past several years, I’ve profiled a number of science-fiction writers, among them William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson. There’s value in seeing how they differ. Gibson, who coined the word “cyberspace,” envisions a future in which giant companies hold sway over a world that’s increasingly fractured, confused, unequal, and ecologically damaged; he’s described his novel “The Peripheral,” from 2014, as taking place in a near-future version of America that’s like the movie “ ‘Winter’s Bone,’ but with better cell phones.” Robinson, by contrast, imagines timelines in which we extricate ourselves from those problems through arduous political, social, and economic reform. Naomi Alderman, in her guardedly optimistic climate-change novel “The Future,” writes, “We are always in the process of catching up to the future. Only when we get there, it’s never what we imagined.” This makes it more valuable to imagine the future in a searching, structured, and detailed way: how else will you discover that, as Alderman writes, “sometimes, just once in a while, it’s better”?
“Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures,” one of Alderman’s characters suggests. The word “futures,” plural, is suggestive; it’s easy for a consensus future to emerge, and for our separate ruminations to center on the same scenarios. In Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” a climate policymaker explains that she and her colleagues “model scenarios”: “We track what has happened, and graph trajectories in things we can measure, and then we postulate that the things we can measure will either stay the same, or grow, or shrink.” The inescapable fact, she admits, is that “scenarios with good results” are “extremely rare.” Which means that new ways of thinking are needed, so that new scenarios can be discovered. New things will have to be measured, new trajectories will have to be explored. Through this process, the future isn’t so much faced as poked, prodded, played with, to create more futures.
At the end of each bathtime, my son’s city blocks fall into the water. Then they drift in a little multicolored flotilla toward the end of the tub, where the drain has created a tiny whirlpool, visible as a bubbly swirl. The blocks are all headed in the same direction, but their exact configuration is always different; they sometimes arrange themselves in surprising designs. It’s easy to obsess about the future, and a little harder to stop obsessing about it. The hardest and most useful thing is really thinking about it. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
