“Don’t worry about the future. It will still be different.»

What will happen in 20 years? In short, I don’t know. Moreover, I don’t want to know. Although, as a human being, I understand such a kind of glass beads game as futurology — predicting the future. And I love science fiction. But I’m not looking for specific answers in it, but a range of possibilities. Don’t be in a hurry to set expectations.

In psychological practice, I often encounter the destructive role of expectations.

People who live well are convinced that their life is full of problems, because in their view everything should be different. But reality will never live up to expectations. Because expectations are fantasy. As a result, such people suffer until they succeed in destroying the expectations of another life. Once that happens, everything gets better.

Expectations are like gray stones from Volkov’s fairy tales about the adventures of the girl Ellie — they do not allow you to get to the Magic Land, attracting and not releasing passing travelers.

What are we doing with our future? We build it in our minds and believe in it ourselves.

I will begin with psychological paradox, almost zen, although the situation is everyday. A joke known to many. «Will he succeed or not?» thought the bus driver, looking in the rearview mirror at the old woman who was running towards the still open doors of the bus. “I didn’t have time,” he thought with chagrin, pressing the button to close the doors.

This paradox expresses the peculiarity of our attitude towards the future: we confuse and do not distinguish between what happens regardless of our actions, and what happens when we turn on.

The problem of the future is the problem of the subject — the problem of who defines it and how.

We cannot be sure of the future, just as we cannot be sure of the present.

Tyutchev in the XNUMXth century formulated this in the lines: “Who dares to say: goodbye, through the abyss of two or three days?” At the end of the XNUMXth century, in the lines of Mikhail Shcherbakov, this sounded even shorter: “But who at the fifth hour knew what would happen to him at the sixth?”

The future often depends on our actions, but rarely on our intentions. Therefore, our actions change it, but often not in the way we plan. Consider Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Its main idea is that there is no direct connection between intentions and actions, but there is an indirect connection.

Who destroyed the Ring of Omnipotence? Frodo changed his mind about destroying it. This was done by Gollum, who had other intentions. But it was the actions of heroes with good intentions and deeds that led to this.

We are trying to make the future more certain than it can be. Because uncertainty gives rise to unpleasant and uncomfortable anxiety that you want to eliminate from life. How? Determine exactly what will happen.

The huge industry of predictions, fortune-tellers, forecasters, astrologers satisfies the psychological need of people to get rid of anxiety, fear of the future through obtaining any kind of fantastic picture of what will happen. The main thing is that the picture should be clear: «What was, what will be, how the heart will calm down.»

And the heart really calms down from any scenario for the future, if only it were certain.

Anxiety is our tool for interacting with the future. She says there’s something we don’t know for sure yet. Where there is no anxiety, there is no future, it is replaced by illusions. If people make plans for life for many decades ahead, they thereby exclude the future from life. They simply prolong their present.

People deal with the future differently.

The first method — «forecast». It is the application of objective processes and laws, deriving from them the intended consequences that must occur regardless of what we do. The future is what will be.

second method — design. Here, on the contrary, the desired goal, the result, is primary. We want something and, based on this goal, we plan how to achieve it. The future is what it should be.

A third method – openness to dialogue with uncertainty and opportunities in the future beyond our scenarios, forecasts and actions. The future is what is possible, what cannot be ruled out.

Each of these three ways of relating to the future brings its own problems.

If we treat the future as fate, this attitude excludes us from shaping the future. Of course, the possibilities of each person individually and humanity as a whole to influence the future are limited, but they are always different from zero.

Studies by the American psychologist Salvatore Maddi show that when a person uses his minimal ability to somehow influence the situation, he is able to cope much better with the stresses of life than when he thinks in advance that nothing can be done and does not try. At least it’s good for health.

Treating the future as a project does not allow you to see what does not fit into it. The ancient wisdom is known: if you really want something, then you will achieve it, and nothing more.

Treating the future as an opportunity allows you to interact with him as productively as possible. As the author of an alternative dictionary on many humanities, Yevgeny Golovakha, wrote, the possible is that which can still be prevented. The meaning of the future is revealed primarily not in ourselves and not in the world itself, but in our interaction with the world, in the dialogue between us. Andrei Sinyavsky said: «Life is a dialogue with circumstances.»

By itself, the meaning that we talk about, trying to understand what awaits us in the future, arises in the process of life itself. It is difficult to find or program in advance. Socrates reminded us that, in addition to what we know, there is something that we do not know (and know it). But there is also something that we do not even know that we do not know. The latter is beyond the capacity of our forecasting and planning. The problem is to be ready for it. The future is something that hasn’t happened yet. Do not miss.