Worries, Future, Planning, Reality
I remember reading something like this somewhere: The bad things I worried about never happened. The bad things things did happen I couldn’t even imagine.
I have always loved this visualisation of the future from the book Speculative Everything, which just to be clear is not a book on managing existential angst, but a book about designing objects from the future that can provoke a conversation about the present, from a field of design called Speculative Design.
What you fish for is the preferred future, worrying what else is probable. But what happens even the most imaginative person cannot uncover. You don’t know, what you can’t know.
This become clearest to me while navigating my father’s treatment after being diagnosed with a case of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer. At each juncture, the original diagnosis, the operation, the treatment etc. I could anticipate many possibilities, and now even more are possible when you can put the entire European and American urology guidelines into NotebookLM, and yet and yet, what happened was something I had not anticipated. I accompanied him on a trip to the States to see my brother, and he had a medical complication, which I had not anticipated (acute urinary retention). Yes, it was not unlikely, and after the fact when I asked fresh questions of my preferred LLM it would tell me it is a likely state along the worsening of BPH, but not a thing I anticipated.
What gives? How do you navigate a future which is fundamentally uncertain and scary, even if you are the most imaginative futurist there is and also sufficiently action-oriented to act in the present and thwart the impact of what might happen?
Divide that energy. Leave some of that energy to actually deal with what happens when it does happen. Instead of spending all that energy in the imagining (worrying) and pre-solving.
Some would say, don’t waste any energy at all. Live now. And live with whatever happens later too.