Why the Future Is Good

welcome to 2023

Happy New Year. I believe today (or yesterday) is also the anniversary of my moving to New York City, eight years ago.

This is a time of year when people make vague jokes about the vibes of the coming cycle. Predictions in my circles seem unusually tempered this round—a kind of cautious “let’s just see.” I’ve heard fewer allusions to the world ending than in maybe any of the last three years, but this is a random sampling that might have no real significance.

Anyway, an orienting idea I’m taking into this year is “trusting the future.” It only recently occurred to me what this could mean, that I wasn’t really doing it, and how a lot of ineffectual corrective mental activity seemed to be downstream of that choice. I want to try to express what it means to me now, and why I think trusting the future is “a good idea.”

An anecdote: A year or two after Donald Trump was elected, my friend Nathan and I started hosting a book club loosely organized around the theme of “hope.” We wanted to read texts that would give us a way of predicting and working towards a future—a political future, a social future—that would actually feel worth looking forward to. We felt, like almost everyone we knew, that this had become more difficult in our lifetime, and we also sensed that the stories we were receiving from our culture were consistently slanted in such a way as to make basic forms of collaboration and collectivity seem impossible, when they didn’t have to be. We sensed that this dominant myth had more to do with why the future seemed bad than actual material scarcity—or rather that it was one of the reasons scarcity kept being reproduced—but we also didn’t know what to do about this. So we drank tea and read books about things like the Zapatistas movement in Chiapas, Mexico, or the organizing of the Montgomery bus boycott—times people had taken matters into their own hands to make a better future for themselves. It was nice, I learned a tremendous amount from it, and I miss the people in that book group, most of whom I don’t see much anymore.

But I now think that we had this “hope” question pretty backwards. We were looking, I think, for two things: a) strategies for improving the future; and b) reasons for thinking that the future could be more favorable than incoming evidence was suggesting. We found plenty of A, but somehow this never resolved our problem. Finding B seemed like it was supposed to, but something about that process was always difficult and grinding. For one thing, no one knows what the future is like. The thinkers who did have positive visions of human flourishing in the twenty-first century often also seemed to have weird, highly individualistic ideas about what human flourishing meant, wanted to live in either a spaceship or a computer, and would wave away issues like the climate crisis with general paeans to optimism and human ingenuity.

We wanted to believe those who said the future was good—but then, that was in a way our whole problem. We were caught in what I now think of as a kind of classic paranoia spiral. Something like: I want to disbelieve my pessimism, because it’s painful, so I seek evidence to refute it; but the knowledge that I’m engaged in motivated selection of evidence makes me aware the entire time that I’m essentially bullshitting myself, albeit in a different direction than I’ve previously been bullshitted. To convince myself I’m intellectually rigorous (and therefore safe), I’ll have to find ways to defeat or contextualize whatever “positive” evidence I do find—and so my original position, whatever it was, will be reinforced.

To recall the Michael Polanyi quote I shared last week, from “The Stability of Beliefs”:

So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.

[…]

So long as each objection is defeated in its turn, its effect is to strengthen the fundamental convictions against which it was raised.

In this case, the “language” we were using assumed that the quality of the future was conditional on some particular set of things happening in the future, on the future being a certain kind of place allowing for certain possibilities and not others. Roughly speaking this is the language of utopias and dystopias, or at a more individual level, fantasy and nightmare.

This is one way of viewing the future and our relationship to it. I’m tempted here to try and describe why that way of seeing might not be “useful,” but I sense that that would only support the language’s underlying premise, that our attitude toward the future is itself primarily a tool for avoiding bad futures and securing good ones. Polanyi again:

The only way to dissent from the theory of the universe implied in a language is to abandon some of its vocabulary and to learn to speak a new language instead.

So, instead of explaining why trusting the future is a good idea, I’ll try to offer some brief notes about it, with a description of the effects for me of moving back and forth from the former mode into this one. I’m just going to call these the conditional mode and the unconditional mode.

The conditional mode says that the future is good assuming such-and-such things happen.

The unconditional mode says very simply that the future is good, whatever happens. Not good in a “yeah, it’s fine” kind of way, but fundamentally, basically, and even viscerally good. In the Dzogchen tradition, the word used is often perfect, or complete.¹

The conditional mode attempts to bring about good futures, and avoid bad ones. It expends quite a lot of energy on this project, which in my experience entails difficult work like:

• properly separating good futures from bad;

• remaining vigilant for signs that a bad future may be approaching;

• remaining vigilant for other people’s ignorance of what constitutes a bad future, or their ignorance that a bad future may be approaching;

• educating others on the above; and, a bit paradoxically,

• selectively ignoring signs that a truly unavoidable bad future might be approaching despite one’s best efforts (for instance, suppressing thoughts about my own death).

The unconditional mode, on the other hand, assumes every possible future is good. Because this is the starting point, the idea doesn’t need to be proved or tested. (Put differently, because it’s the starting point, every application of the theory proves it correct.) Therefore, the unconditional mode tends to leave more energy available for other kinds of activities. These are definitionally harder to list, but could include:

• appreciating present sensory experience without explicit regard for future states;

• appreciating conceptions of future states as present sensory experiences;

• making predictions about the future, without needing to weight things in favor of one outcome or another;

• sometimes acting to avoid particular outcomes, in favor of others that seem even better, cooler, more beautiful;

• just doing stuff; and

• finding or creating meanings around and from the uncontrollable outcomes (for instance, conceiving my physical death as the only chance I’ll get to experience dying, or appreciating that it will allow other people and forms to take my place, or asking how I can die beautifully).

Someone operating in the conditional mode always understands at some level that it is necessary to preserve the possibility of good futures. But they may miss that they are also working to preserve the possibility of bad ones. The conditional mode just wouldn’t be useful if the future was definitively good or definitively bad—and the conditional mode, like any language, wants to preserve its usefulness. So a person in the conditional mode is constantly adjusting either their conditions or their sources of evidence, and the skill and creativity with which they do this (in interaction with so-called objective conditions) will tend to have a large impact on their sense of well-being. Optimists and pessimists are people operating at different poles of this spectrum. Clinical psychology describes extreme and cyclical swings from one end to the other as Bipolar Disorder, but in my view this swinging is only a more extreme case of what everyone experiences in the conditional mode, a logical result of the neverending balancing act that the conditional mode is. In a two-pole system, one is always getting closer to the good pole (which feels good) or closer to the bad pole (which feels bad)—but it is necessary for the system’s preservation that you never fully arrive at either.

I think this is why transitions out of the conditional mode (and radical alterations to one’s theories of good and bad) tend to happen in moments of total despair or incredible ecstasy: near-death experiences, group rituals, wars, natural disasters, and, uh, music festivals. Transitions seem especially likely when the two extremes find some sort of quick oscillation pattern. My first sustained experience of an unconditional mode came during an LSD trip where I experienced panic (lost a dear friend) and then ecstasy (found him!) in the span of about ten minutes. It felt like the existential equivalent of a rubber band snapping. The rubber band was the conditional mode.

I could go on about the distinctions between these attitudes, and could go even further into the weeds to point out all the ways that separating them from each other creates its own confusions. But I came here to talk about trusting the future, so let’s do that instead. Here’s a random set of pointers, metaphors, and so on.

1

Imagine you’re walking in the woods, it’s getting dark, and you hear wolves yipping in the distance. As you walk, the sound comes closer, and then much closer, and suddenly, it stops. Actually step into this scenario, develop it a bit, and try to imagine what you would do, how you would feel, and how you would want to feel.

For whatever reason, this scenario suggests to me what I mean by trusting the future. It has nothing to do with ignoring the wolves, putting your hands over your ears, or telling a story that they definitely are or are not coming to eat you. There’s this other attitude, where you trust the wolves to be what and where they are, and relax your breathing, and simply allow your senses to stretch deeply into the woods around you. In a sense you could say you are welcoming the wolves, because you are preparing for them, and because respecting and appreciating their power is the most likely way to stay alive and maybe even to enjoy your final moments, if that’s what they are.

Now if you like, you could try bringing this same attitude to the place you’re in now—or to some possibility you’ve been avoiding thinking about—and see what happens.

2

Trusting the future is a good idea for the same reason that trusting my partner in a relationship is a good idea; it invites my partner to be trustworthy. If I refuse to trust the future, I deny it the chance to be generous. The following may sound superstitious, but I believe it’s true at numerous non-woo levels: The future knows how we feel about it, and responds accordingly.

3

Trusting the future is a good idea for the same reason that trusting the ground is a good idea; it allows me to plant my feet firmly. Earthquakes do happen. But those who distrust the ground can never relax.

4

On a warm day last fall I was sitting reading on the subway when a short shaggy man with no shirt came in from the next car wielding a flattened cardboard box. “It is hot in here!” he shouted gleefully, and then he repeated that two more times to no one in particular, and then he sat on the bench and planted the tall piece of cardboard in front of him as a kind of bulwark against the rest of us. “Train is good!” he declared, and then he laughed and repeated that too. “Train is good!” We arrived at Houston and he yelled: “Houston is good!” He kept this up for as long as I was on the train, peering out from behind his makeshift wall every so often to find another thing to affirm, truly shouting at full volume through the entire very packed car. The woman next to me twisted and gave a moan that was out of the pure pit of hell. At one point, the man and I made eye contact, and he grinned down at the copy of Keith Dowman’s The Dzogchen View I was holding and shouted, “Reading is good! Reading is good!" It occurred to me that this man was almost an embodiment of the view I was only reading about. He had no shirt and perhaps no reliable way to find his next meal, but he seemed to have figured out, at least for the moment, something about his perceptual system that no one else on the train dared apply. To them the train was not good, not right now, because this fucking lunatic was shouting at them and they weren’t even allowed to resent him for it. It would have been easier if he’d been miserable and begging for money.

I tell this story merely to introduce the idea that an extremely simple but powerful mechanism for visionary insight is to declare individual things good. The harder or more complicated the thing is for me to appreciate, the bigger and more interesting the felt shift. In the past few days, I have declared basically good: my own death; the deaths of my parents; growing old and frail; watching my family and friends grow old and frail; New York City; my continuing distrust of New York City; the song “New York, New York” as performed by Liza Minnelli in Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York; my hometown of Ringgold, Georgia; Ringgold High School; my loneliness at Ringgold High School; winter; my dislike of winter; NPR; stupid and superficial coverage of complex political problems; stupidity; writing; writing badly; my ex-girlfriends; the end of my most recent relationship; the relationship; the atomic bomb; chronic muscle tension; and two friends arguing in the street at 4:00 am by the bus stop on the first day of the new year.

It’s crazy, but you truly can call anything you want good, like you mean it, without needing any justification whatsoever. In almost every case, something loosens, and then justifications for the declaration bubble up from nowhere. I could convince myself that these justifications are the cause of the declaration, or of the goodness. But they aren’t—they’re just the narrative elaborations of a different way of seeing.

The conditional mode is also good, by the way. (I’m just saying so.) It may be a crucial stage in human development. For me, the most appealing scenario at the moment is maybe something like, being able to run a conditional mode within an unconditional “frame”—as appropriate.

5

When I trust the future, awareness immediately and naturally expands. Could it be that the future is simply a word I use for a space that surrounds me?

—

Happy New Year, once again. The new year is good!

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1. Those familiar with nondual traditions may be wanting to point out that the view would be more accurately expressed as “nothing is inherently good or bad.” That’s true, but I’m going for a felt sense here, so I’m simplifying.