Why We Can't Think About the Future—and Why It Matters

Thinking about the future? Well, the brain does something unusual. It is not able to place ‘yourself’ into the future; on the contrary, it ‘thinks’ about a completely different person—that is not ‘you’. This is confirmed by many fMRI studies. The further in time we try to imagine our own life, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) shows less activation. In simple terms, it is harder to ‘imagine’ and think what kind of person we would be in the future and what lies ahead of ourselves in the world we would be living in.

Future is either a distant ‘time’ scripted for us in terms of technological situations, environmental, social and cultural, economic, and political situations, or a distant ‘time’ that is impregnated with possibilities and attitudes we hold ‘now’—that which is born out of our current state of mind, that which we consciously choose, and not that which we unconsciously adopt and are coerced to adapt.

It is imperative to understand our current and past to see how life is unfolding right under our nose and eyes. What are the patterns and the metapatterns hidden behind these patterns is something that must become clear to us.

How do ChatGPT and internet browsing impact our brain and cognitive functioning, and how, at the given rate, is it going to impact us even more going into the future? What ‘kind’ of jobs would be available in the future, and how is one likely to earn money? What would health mean?

Would I be plagued under fear of the so-called newly invented ‘risk’ and new biochemistry ranges insistently promoted by Big Pharma and the medical profession? What would be the future of schooling? If mugging up textbooks is all that schooling and education are, then that can be done better by open-source, richly curated multimedia courses and AI-enabled ecosystems.

How will relationships be impacted in the future—as it is, I have a more ‘real’ relationship with my phone than any other human ecosystem that I am supposedly a part of.

Fundamentally, am I aware of how I think? Are ‘my thoughts’ my ‘own’? What I call my thoughts—are they not ‘suggestions’ coming from outside and darting into my mental consciousness? Is my mind empty or full all the time? Do I sense that I am still in control of myself—capable of fully exercising the capacities of my mind to think, to reason, to imagine?

Thinking about the future would mean: what is it that I need to do now? What is it that my children should do now, lest we are smartly and subtly pushed into a scripted future which promises the ‘human’ takeover by technology, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, amongst other ‘hidden’ agendas. We do not wish a proxy of ourselves, do we?

Is the world changing or being changed?

Think.