Why speculating about the future is futile in a crisis

Along with bingeing Tiger King on Netflix and watching other people’s homes on Zoom, a popular quarantine pastime is making broad, sweeping statements about what the post-Corona world will be like.

This is futile (and tasteless too).

The reason is threefold.

Firstly, just like imagining yourself ever being hungry after pigging out on an all-you-can-eat buffet or drinking an alcoholic beverage when waking up with a hangover, we are simply not capable of making constructive judgments about the future when the present is in disarray. This is known in psychology as priming, wherein ”exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus.” In other words, anything said about the future during present conditions is bound to be merely an extension of the present, just as hollow as ”I’ll never eat again”

Secondly, we mistake our own wishful thinking for macroeconomic forces at play in the world. Think of this as a mild case of psychosis. When clinically diagnosed, a psychosis inhibits the patient from distinguishing between his/her own inner world and the real world around them. Similarly, if you’ve spent the past decade wishing for lower carbon dioxide emissions, job-stealing robots or digital disruption, chances are you’ll look for any sign that these wishes are being answered by the covid-19 genie. 

Finally, we tend to overestimate the long term impact of crises. The dot-com bubble in the year 2000 was supposedly the end of all digital business models. The financial crash of 2008 signaled the end of banks and capitalism. And of course, the current pandemic is the end of the world as we have known it. We make similar melodramatic assumptions about life. We believe we’ll be irreparably damaged by losing certain things or loved ones. We believe that we will be fundamentally different people just because a set of external conditions changes - ”I broke up with X” or ”I quit job Y.” These self-delusions are practical as coping skills but deceptive as scenario planning tools. 

So, if you find yourself addicted to the avalanche of armchair punditry currently dominating news headlines and social media feeds, by all means continue. And just like the infinite monkey theorem stipulates that a thousand monkeys hammering random keys of a typewriter ad inifintium might produce a masterpiece serendipitously, surely one of the millions of random statements about the future will have the semblance of prophecy…with the benefit of hindsight. 

However, there are plenty of more movies to watch, novels to read and worlds to explore.
So close your eyes, draw a deep breath, take a break. This too shall pass, my friend.