The Inescapable Chaos of the Future-Storm

We love to predict the future. It’s the basis of a lot of the economy (what do you think stocks are?), and science prides itself in tuning accurate formulas for what-may-occur. Data is so useful to business that it’s dipping into buzzword territory—predicting consumer behaviors is as useful as it is terrifying.

But what’s most important to this post is how we try to predict our personal lives. That’s what making plans is all about. Planning for the future of your family, planning your career, planning where you’ll be living.

Perhaps predicting is too scientific a term. You aren’t making calculations on whether you’ll have a partner in a month—it’s all based off vibes and expectations. Any decision about your life is one informed by what you’ll be expecting in the future.

There’s no escaping this.

Even if you never think of the future directly, there’s an implicit awareness of what-will-happen in almost anything you do. Being comfortable in your career or relationship or hobbies implies that there’s little to no danger of those going awry. You’re planning for no change, for things to just keep ticking along.

If you can get to this point (assuming that most of the important parts of your life are in this state of comfort) that’s awesome, and I don’t mean for this post to drag you out of that. If you’re confident in your situation, don’t let this shake that.

But something I’ve had to remind myself is that, at least for me, this way of thinking can be dangerous. What I describe below has worked for me, but it may very well not work for you.

After all, I’m just some random person on the internet, and you should never take the words of some random person on the internet to be law.

You’re probably familiar with the Butterfly Effect. Something as small as the flap of a butterfly’s wings has the potential to have great ramifications in the reaches of time. There’s a related concept in physics called chaos.

Just like any terms in physics, it has a precise definition and feel. I’ll try my best to briefly capture it here, since I have neither the time nor the will to bore you with an in-depth discussion of all the terms we’d need. For this post’s purposes, know that scientific chaos is the idea that a tiny, tiny change in initial conditions can have big enough effects that it’s practically impossible to predict what will happen based on that tiny change.

A good example of this is the weather. A tiny pressure difference somewhere in the atmosphere could be the line between a perfectly sunny day or a hurricane. That’s why weather forecasts are only ever listed with probabilities tacked on. Trust me, it’s not because meteorologists are bad at their job—far from it. It really is just that difficult to predict the weather.

There are many other examples I could list (double pendulums, three-body gravitational systems, etc), but suffice it to say that this is a big enough field that, well, there’s a whole field for it called Chaos Theory.

My grand thesis for this post is that human lives are similarly chaotic.

Even narrowing it down to a single person, I try to think of the times that I’ve been able to consistently predict what someone will say. It only happens with people I know really well, and even then, I can only reliably predict up to a tenth of what they say in any conversation, which is hugely generous.

Not that I want to be able to perfectly predict what people say or think. That would be so boring—part of the wonder of interacting with others is the unpredictability. The shock and joy of exploring the mind of another living being. Each conversation like wandering down a mountain trail—you can never see the whole mountain at once, know it fully; but you can see the trees and animals and sights that the trail has to offer you. And isn’t that wonderful?

Oops, I think I started to wander into another essay. Back to the future.

Now factor in how much power someone’s words can have on you. They can influence your decisions or change the very course of your life. Even the small actions of a stranger can shift your mood slightly, which itself sets the course for your own thoughts and actions for a time.

That’s only a single person affecting a single person. Imagine how a whole year’s worth of interactions influences you as a person—not even including everything you did to influence others.

Now try to imagine the roiling, writhing mass of a whole society’s grasp on the future… well, it frankly hurts. Your trajectory colliding with everyone else’s. The whole web of connections and actions spinning around and around in a dizzying array of sheer life! Tornadoes and earthquakes and good harvests and the phase of the moon all making their marks. The universe itself dipping tendrils into the cauldron and giving it a good stir.

This is the Future-Storm.

I don’t mean for this to be overwhelming. It felt like it at first to me—how impossible it seemed to keep my balance in the face of the winds buffeting me, trying to knock me over.

If you’ve spent any time in the heart of a powerful storm, you know the best way to stay on your feet is to lean into it.

By this, I don’t mean that I let all my plans get sucked away into the wind, but that I expect those plans to be rocked, even if in small ways. Though, expecting specific changes isn’t useful to me, either. Every time I’ve overthought a problem, splitting it into a dozen future scenarios, none of those scenarios were the one that actually occurred. Because of course not.

I cannot reach into the Future-Storm and grab out a “correct” prediction. That’s not how it works. One of the reasons I like the storm analogy is that I think of the future as shifting constantly, the winds eddying and flowing in a way that’s impossible to see where they will end up. Only the immediate future (like, a second or less (and sometimes not even that close)) is knowable, and the farther out you go, the greater the storm grows.

Chaos.

I’ve learned to expect change in a very nebulous way. To expect that things will end up different than I expect, but not how I think they might be different. That’s just adding a new expectation that will turn out wrong.

This may seem like it’s soul-sucking and impossible. Why even plan at all? Well, as for plans, I think this is just another argument to prepare in a highly general and versatile way. A rigid plan is one that will easily snap under pressure.

But there’s more that I wanna say before I end this post. I think that, somewhat paradoxically, the Future-Storm soothes and excites me.

I’m one who’s prone to overthinking, about both the past and the future, and especially about relationships (romantic or otherwise). When I really boil it down, the Future-Storm for me is a way I view the world that also works very well as a tool to soothe my anxieties. I use it to tell myself that endlessly overthinking the future is putting my energy where it does not need to go, and to let the Storm take care of a lot more things.

Of course I still plan, but it’s much more fluid now.

And beyond that, there’s a wonder to uncertainty. It’s the same flavor of wonder as interacting with other people—there’s a joy to discovering what the Future-Storm has to churn out. I feel like I more often hear about the negative things that life has to throw at us—and of course, those things do happen—but I think we underplay the positives.

Something I frequently wonder at is the long list of people that have changed my life who I also only happened to meet by chance. My greatest friendships were born of chance interactions that grew into greater and more beautiful relationships.

Another example is clouds. You will never see the same one twice. Each day, a new canvas of big or little puffs enter the sky to be painted upon by the sun and wind and the colors of sunrise and sunset. It feels so huge, so unknowable, but in a way that makes me feel gloriously and comfortably small. But again, that’s a whole other essay.

Isn’t all that wonderful? Joyful? Each time I think of it, the more I come to love the Universe and its Future-Storm.

As with all ways to look at the world, the Future-Storm is ultimately a tool. It may work for me, but it may not work for you, and neither situation is better or worse than the other. Such is the nature of tools—no tool is bad, but simply useful or useless depending on how someone tries to apply it.

I’m writing this essay because I think it may help some people or grant someone a new way of looking at the world, and those are wonderful things.

With that, I bid you farewell. Go absorb the world some today.