
As each new year comes around it is all but impossible to avoid thinking about the future. What will 2025 bring? But there are few things more futile than speculating about the future because we cannot possibly know what hasn’t happened yet. The future always catches us by surprise as it did in 2024, and will again in the coming year, and every year after that.
This is incredibly frustrating. Everyone wants to know the future and predicting it has been a kind of cottage industry since the beginning of recorded time. Fortune tellers, seers, prophets, crystal gazers, soothsayers, sybils, astrologers, prophets, futurologists, and public opinion pollsters have plagued humanity with misinformation about the future, and have always found people simple enough to believe them.
We can make educated guesses, of course, just as science fiction writers make educated guesses about the future of science, and gamblers about the potential of a particular racehorse. Public guesswork about the future is now primarily the business of journalists and politicians, but the results are the same as when the astrologers had the job. The future is a state of mind, not a state of reality. There is no future to predict, not yet. What it comes down to is how we feel about the future. If we ask that question, we find that the American population right now it's almost equally divided between those who feel eager optimism about the coming year and those who feel a dark pessimism.
This is an interesting situation, a kind of expectations deadlock, much like the political deadlock in Congress, and for the same reason. The results of both deadlocks may be the same — nothing will happen, and the coming year will be paralysis as usual, which is probably the best possible outcome.
Pessimists are usually right about the future, but they are miserable themselves and make everybody else miserable. Although I prefer not to believe it, it may be that the entire human race is preprogrammed for pessimism as a survival tactic. A million-year history of suffering, deprivation, war, and disappointment would be enough to discourage any tendency to blue-sky thinking in any species.
Studies suggest that optimism is a losing strategy because it leads to unrealistic plans and bad decisions. Optimists tend to suffer from poor memories and forget what happened last time, which is why going to war with the next tribe, whoever they are, is one of the most repetitive and useless human activities and always has been. But who cares? As long as it feels like the right thing to do, we are sure to win.
So we do have a choice as we gaze into the invisible future, and there's a lot to be said for optimism. It makes life so much brighter. Our philosophical guide is the character Pangloss in Voltaire’s 1759 novel called Candide or Optimism. Pangloss held to the theory that “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” No matter how many dreadful things happened to him – and many did – Pangloss always found an optimistic way to explain them. Even when he was hanged he looked on the bright side.
So let’s move forward into the shiny new year of 2025 in the optimistic spirit of Pangloss. He was almost always wrong and may have been a fool, but at least he woke up every morning hoping for the best.