“I CAN’T predict the future, so I can’t tell you what to do,” the mortgage adviser said with the weariness of a man who had uttered variations of that sentence thousands of times. I was asking if I should fix my rate for two years or five, remembering conversations with my dad about how steeply the interest rates had climbed in the early 1990s. At one point he was paying an interest rate of 15% and working 14-hour days in a takeaway just to stay afloat. Is it going to get that bad again, I wondered, as my phone pinged with notifications about the base rate rising and fuel poverty looming. Where will we be in five years?

There are too many variables – known and unknown, personal and societal – to answer that with accuracy, but after a few years of what feels like greater than usual uncertainty, I find myself longing for definitive answers in a way I never have before. Yet they don’t exist. And while futurists and algorithms may at times be able to make fairly astute predictions about the way the world is moving, the average person is pretty rubbish at guessing what’s going to happen (and just as bad at modifying their behaviour in response to what an "expert" has predicted).

Most of us, I’m sorry to say, fall into that average person camp. Ask yourself the following to determine how finely tuned your instincts are: How much do you think you’ve changed over the past decade, and to what extent do you think you’ll change over the next 10 years? In 2013, a team of social psychologists posed this question to more than 19,000 people aged between 18 and 68. Overwhelmingly, people of all ages reported having changed a lot in the past, and expected they wouldn’t change very much in the coming years. They considered their present self to be their final, fully-realised self, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as the “end-of-history” illusion. An illusion, of course, because we cannot know the future events – relationships, deaths, achievements, pandemics – that lie in store and how they’ll shape us, but it’s almost certain they will, whatever they are.

Even when we do consider what might happen to us, we have a tendency, as the psychologist Neil Weinstein observed, towards “unrealistic optimism” – a belief we have an above-average chance of experiencing positive life events, and a below average chance of encountering negative life events. We think bad things are more likely to happen to other people, even when we have statistical evidence suggesting otherwise. How many people flouted the Covid restrictions because they thought they’d somehow magically dodge catching it? How many are staring down the barrel of the energy crisis and assuming, wrongly, they won’t be affected by it?

Our emotions and personal biases often influence how we think the future will pan out. If we are strongly wedded to a particular ideology or we are experts in a certain field, our judgment of what happens next is likely to be clouded, not illuminated, by the lens through which we view the world. As someone who has worked on magazines for more than a decade, I struggle to envisage walking into a supermarket that has no shelves dedicated to the glossy titles I love, even though I’ve watched full aisles shrink to become minuscule displays over the past few years. When a magazine I worked on was closed down, it was an ice-water shock, an eventuality I hadn’t seriously entertained despite having seen other titles of the same genre suffer the same fate. In part, that was because of my unrealistic optimism, but the psychologist Daniel Kahneman would likely say it was also because I’d adopted an "inside view" of my circumstances, assuming that my knowledge of and familiarity with my own magazine was more relevant than what was statistically happening within the sector more broadly.

A broad and unbiased overview is important if we want to make anything approaching an accurate prediction. You may be familiar with Philip Tetlock’s theory that decision-makers can be divided into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. A hedgehog tends to be guided by one big idea and will make grand, confident, often baseless statements about the future (consider Boris Johnson’s claim in June 2019 that the UK “is forecast in our lifetimes to become the largest and most prosperous economy in this hemisphere”). Foxes, meanwhile, are more successful forecasters because they take a more generalised and impartial approach, reviewing all possible scenarios and acknowledging the complexity of the multiple forces that intertwine to produce an outcome.

Sometimes we can’t conceive of what these forces might be. The Wired writer Paul Ford points to how the streaming platform Twitch couldn’t have been predicted 40 years ago because “it’s a child with so many parents: It required alchemy between the internet, the AAA video game industry, specialised 3D computer chips, low-cost camera equipment, and a thousand other ancillary industry-scale things that seem obvious in hindsight”. Our imaginations are often limited by the infrastructure that surrounds us today; either that or we fantasise wildly about sci-fi-esque situations with no basis at all in the present. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between (David Bowie’s prediction in 1999 about the impact of the internet is a good example).

But even the greatest visionary can’t control what happens in the future. None of us can. What we can do, though, is make an effort to shape it. We can make plans based on what we’d like to happen. We can push, protest and fight for change. I don’t know where we’ll be in five years’ time, but I know where I’d like us to be. There’s no way of knowing if it will all work out, so tethering my happiness to it would be a form of self-harm, but I think my future self would like to look back and know I tried. Maybe that’s all that really matters.

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