Think About The Future

We all think about the future. At least we say we do. But I’m not sure we really accept how time unfolds for us.

I knew someone who had 5- and 10-year plans for her career, and I can tell you they didn’t work out. (Hint: if you make plans for the future, do things that help you bring those plans to fruition.) I’m sure she would not have predicted dying at 60.

As a kid, I saw a Warner Brothers cartoon, “The Old Grey Hare,” that took us far into the future: the year 2000.  And then, when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out we all thought, “Wow, that’s so far in the future! We’ll never see that!”

And then we had Y2K, 911, and a host of other events—plus the blooming of the Internet economy that put predicting the future into a chaotic tailspin.

Currently we’re living in that future. I’m at that point in my life now where I’ll look at a use by date on a can of chicken and it says May 2026, and I can’t believe it. Wait! What year is it? To quote David Byrne: How did we get here?