What Happened to the Future?
What Happened to the Future?
Have we lost our ability to look ahead?
Most Americans are waiting. For what or whom, they do not know. Because they do not know, they cannot plan, they cannot hope or dread. They cannot borrow or save but only spend. They cannot tolerate silence because, to them, silence is an invitation to the thing they await they neither hope nor dread. But, when we have not hope, dread is all there is.
Last time I checked, major purchases indicated few Americans are planning for the future. Or, perhaps it’s better to say, few people are looking ahead.
When I say “few” in a land of 330 million souls, it leaves a large number who are looking ahead. Signs of people looking ahead include:
the savings rate,
the demand for housing,
the demand for automobiles,
the birth rate,
and the like.
But there’s another form of looking ahead that doesn’t show up in “official” government economic statistics:
buying land for personal use,
stocking up on food and water,
getting a ham radio license,
learning how to kill, dress, and store wild game,
raising chickens for eggs,
learning medical treatment beyond first aid,
installing a generator and fuel tank,
building a network of trusted allies,
and much else to prepare for long-running emergencies.
Both are examples of looking ahead. The first set indicates expectations of peace and prosperity. The latter, something else.
The housing and automobile industries are pessimistic on their own futures in terms of financial outlook. They expect the market will rebound at some point in the future, but their short-term forecasts are bleak. The savings rate in America is nearing an all-time low. Some of this is the result of record inflation since January 20, 2021. But some of it is something else.
I hinted at this early in the week.
That post was inspired by several days of being in constant conversation with a large number of colleagues. I noticed a dichotomy in the future-looking thoughts of my friends. On the one hand, they showed great enthusiasm for their future professional lives—planning, budgeting, recruiting, prospecting. On the other hand, they showed little interest in their personal lives or the world beyond work. The latter marked a sharp change in this company’s normal behavior. For almost sixteen years, I’ve enjoyed working with people who seemed more interested in their colleagues lives than in their work. Suddenly, though, work was all that mattered.
I’m not talking about everyone, of course. The people I’m closest to, including my bosses, actually ask about personal lives and well being more than they ask about work related things. Perhaps modern tools already tell them everything they want to know about work. And they’re decent enough people to take an interest in the real lives of others. But the nature of conversation of large groups is definitely less intimate than it was five years ago.
That’s a small sample size, but let’s look large. Crime is up. Violent crime is way up. Aggressive mob crime is something we’ve never seen before. In Austin, Texas, recently, street races shut down the city for a time, and police were at a loss to stop it. Most telling, young people are not getting married or having children.
So, I’ll give you that there are people looking ahead, but they are on the margins. Between those with positive expectations and those expecting to go involuntarily off the grid lies a large body of the population seems to live only for the present.
Everyone has heard of the “fight or flight” response, but psychologists tell us there’s no such thing. Rather, there is a “freeze, flee, or fight” response, and the order indicates how most people respond to shocking events. Most freeze, some flee, a few fight.
The preppers are the fighters. They are always a minority, but that minority is growing. Though I won’t defend my position here, the flee crowd is represented by my first set of planners—people who planning to buy a house, get a new car, raise a family. That group is shrinking. It’s shrinking so fast that both the freezers and the fighters are growing.
What I saw this week seemed a perfect example of the phenomenon. The world offers nothing but silence, so they turn to the noise of busy work. They have memorized an ice-breaker question, and they use it over and over on everyone they meet. And it’s always about something potentially work related. “Take any interesting trips lately?”
My answer to that overused question is usually something unexpected. “I walked all the way to the 35 building to use the bathroom yesterday,” being my favorite. That person will have to find a new ice breaker to use on me.
Five years ago, the default answers were personal: a trip to Hawaii or their daughter’s graduation in New York. But, now, the answers (from the sane people) were all about work—a client they visited, a conference they attended, or prospect in a other country. Five years ago, respondents to such a question assumed the inquisitor wanted to know about them; in 2023, we assume they want to know about our jobs.
Five years ago, our hope was for a better life. In 2023, the hopes of many are limited to professional success, as if we no longer expect our lives to improve. Where we once dreamed of five o’clock so we could have some fun, we now look forward to the morning commute.
James O’Keefe’s last and biggest win at Project Veritas demonstrates this. A man exposed Pfizer’s gain-of-function-for-profit scheme because work was all he could talk about on a date. O’Keefe’s first win—the ACORN videos—were similar but different. He went into an ACORN office to elicit the workers’ illegal activities, but, in 2023, his agent needed only to walk into a bar. Work is all we have to keep us sane.
The freezers and the fighters know something is coming. The flee crowd does not. They don’t see it. But the flee crowd drives the economy and gets all the attention. They make more money, live in “better” subdivisions, and drive more luxurious cars than the other group. They’re elites, but they strive to be. They don’t fight because they’ve heard that cooperation leads to greater successes. They don’t freeze because they are men and women of action. While their lives are rather dull, they’re all we hear about. They could be in their 70s or their 20s, but they’re on the move always and everywhere, fleeing as if their lives depended on it. If they do catch a glimpse of what the freezers dread and the fighters punch, they believe they can outrun it.
But fleet is exhausting, and burned out fleers usually fall in amongst the frozen. The sliver with the highest energy become fighters. And that’s why the freeze and fight segments grow.
In my previous post on this topic, I included a lamentation Psalm—Psalm 12. What some people missed, I believe, was a feature common to most or all lamentation Psalms: the twist. The best example of the twist comes from the one of the most famous lamentations of all, Psalm 21 in the Knox Bible, which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” anticipating Christ’s torture and death on the cross. But let’s look to end of that lamentation, beginning at verse 18:
I can count my bones one by one; and they stand there watching me, gazing at me in triumph. They divide my spoils among them, cast lots for my garments. Then, Lord, do not stand at a distance; if thou wouldst aid me, come speedily to my side. Only life is left me; save that from the sword, from the power of these dogs; rescue me from the very mouth of the lion, the very horns of the wild oxen that have brought me thus low.
And, the twist:
Then I will proclaim thy renown to my brethren; where thy people gather, I will join in singing thy praise,
Praise the Lord, all you that are his worshippers; honour to him from the sons of Jacob, reverence to him from Israel’s race!
He has not scorned or slighted the appeal of the friendless, nor turned his face away from me; my cry for help did not go unheeded.
Take what I owe thee, my song of praise before a great assembly. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the sight of his worshippers; the poor shall eat now, and have their fill, those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him, Refreshed be your hearts eternally! The furthest dwellers on earth will bethink themselves of the Lord, and come back to him; all the races of the heathen will worship before him; to the Lord royalty belongs, the whole world’s homage is his due.
Him shall they worship, him only, that are laid to rest in the earth, even from their dust they shall adore.
I, too, shall live on in his presence, and beget children to serve him; these to a later age shall speak of the Lord’s name; these to a race that must yet be born shall tell the story of his faithfulness, Hear what the Lord did.
In the final verses of the lamentation of the cruelest personal assault in the Bible, we find the cure for every evil that attacks us today. And the cure is within the reach of every one of us:
Rejoice!
Praise the Lord
Realize God has not abandoned you
Feed the poor
Unify in God
Bring forth children to praise Him after you’ve returned home
All of my dark, dread-filled posts point this simple truth: without God, we can do nothing but fail.
I forget this all the time. Every day. Every waking hour. I write to myself. I am not ashamed to write my laments, and I sometimes forget the twist. The twist is that all our dreadful foreboding and even the realization of our worst fears leads us to only one possible solution: trust in the Lord.
Lent began Wednesday, but if you go way back into Church history, Lent begins this coming Sunday. You still have time to set aside a period to be your own tormentor, to visit upon yourself your fears—no music, no cream in your coffee, no hot showers, no social media. Whatever. Whatever creature comfort you say you can’t live without, live without it. Be the dogs that snarl at you, the lion’s mouth that crushes you, the wild oxen that trample you.
And in your fright, pain, and suffering rejoice and praise the Lord who has not abandoned us.
That is Lent. Without the cross there is no resurrection. Without loss there is no recovery.
And prepare. Prepare so that future generations will know that, without God, they can do nothing but sin and fail, for having lost sight of that truth explains every disease infecting the world today.
He for whom we wait is already here.
