The Future is Not Distant

Time is a rather odd thing to measure. The origin of the future is always drawn in relation to the present. For this reason the future is used solely for the purposes of the fickle and pithy politics of now. But the future is its own thing. Regardless of what we might want the world to be like and what our opposition the tangents of the current development might be, the future will be what it has to be.

We are complex beings in a complex world and our perspectives cannot reflect the simplicity of narrative clarity. Our perspectives of the time that we live in as well as our projections about the future ought to be informed with the depth our imagination and the rawness of our most deeply felt poetic visions. Nothing else will do. By getting lost in discussions and the inertia of contemporary politics, we are losing sight of what we see beyond the horizon.

Projection is serious business. It is not mere speculation and fiction. Reading patterns in the direction that the wind blows the sand takes a capacity to plunge ourselves into the future indefinite with a fearless passion.

Until we do so, we will not really begin to uncover the threads that binds our time in such an incoherent tangle. We can also choose to let this tangle be a tangle, completely ignoring the imperative to resolve it. But then we want to know. And this desire has to make peace with only fragments and pieces available and no confirmation and validation except internal-validation available.

The question of the future makes it all the more important to get used to the possibility of self-validation. To-not-give-a-shit is equated with either an opt-out arrangement or a loser-like attitude. But it can also be the optimal attitude for swimming against the current. Care is a easy token for manipulation. Not caring can be an optimal strategy to escape the predatory hooks for manipulation. For manipulation is necessary and compulsory. But who will manipulate? And who will be manipulated? Self-manipulation lays open the scope of rendering the persona as a resource. The question then is who-can-you-be and not who-are-you. The self-identifying question can be dismissed as a mere distraction and a ploy to set us off-course.

It is possible to visit the future. We have been there. And we can describe its qualities. Though we will not be able to detail what it looks like because we could not really see anything, we were as if blindfolded.

In the future, people live forever but they have to die and be reborn periodically. The spiritual question has become very important and people do not associate bodies with psyches anymore. In the future, time does not accumulate in history - layer after layer and rather gets repeatedly flushed away. The economy of bodies is maintained but the variance of beings is infinite. In the future stories and dreams are the only way of traveling. No one will bother to physically move anymore. In the future, families have changed. I will not describe the nature of the human or the relationships that constitute the changed familial system.

Because there is no singular future. There are only multiple possibilities. We see glimpses of some futuristic possibilities but not then sometimes it is blank. All of us need to invest our neurosis into this projecting-into-the-unknown-exercise to fill-in this blankness more.