Out Of The Way

When you know that you know what you know, knowing that what you know will not change what people will do because you know they're going to act upon what they think they know, do you pretend to make an effort to stop them? Or do you let them do what you know they're going to do anyway?

Holding a copy of the Book of the Future, no matter how frail and temporary it may be, I solidly know what people will do. I don't have tea leaves or astrology or Nostradamus or woolly worms or any other method to divine the future. I simply have the simple facts of what people will do with the limited resources and options available to them. We tend to stay within our lanes of forward motion. In other words, we do not do what we do not know how to do.

Take all of our thoughts and skills and actions and plot them out through a pencil sharpener and you get the condensed version of what we'll do with who we are and what we have.

From the reactions of stageplay audiences to the announcements at global summits, we reveal who we were meant to be. Take old newspapers, cut out the names and places of the past and you can bet you can almost randomly stick in new names and places and see the newspaper articles or website headlines reappear in tomorrow's news.

The perspective of age and the wisdom of insight make one sigh with the comfort of knowing all is well with the world. We reinvent ourselves over and over, with our short lifetimes making us believe we are the next, new, bright, resourceful generation, the best that ever was.

Roving gangs of murderers change their titles but they don't change. Peaceniks find new causes to call their own. Causes of death vary by population habits but people still die on a regular basis. Our anatomy, our genetic makeup, our vessels for living evolve no matter what we believe about evolution.

From that, I navigate my way through life, knowing where most of the shoreline, shifting sandbars, thunderstorms and Murphy's Law popups will occur. Probability and statistics. I consult fancier and fancier versions of the typical switchboard operator who connects me to party lines so I can listen in on clandestine conversations between global leaders not meant for public dissemination.

Some people bet on their knowledge of the future. Natural risk-takers. Extrovertive exhibitionists. Showoffs. Gamblers. Braggadocios. The quiet, introvertive, millionaire next-door. Movers and shakers and benchsitters.

What do you do if you have the future in your hand? I sit back and relax, seeing that what I want to say about what people will or can do rarely changes their actions. A shopper may switch from buying a red shirt to a blue one because someone said blue is the next red but to the shirtmaker, that shopper is still buying a shirt. I may see people driving a government-issued vehicle on the weekend who charge their weekend use of their vehicle to their weekday job and then I decide to report those persons for misuse of government funds, stopping their source of secondary income, but they will probably find another way to make money from their job that I can't see. We may run into obstacles but we continue our habits in one form or another.

How do you see the future? You can do it just like me. Put aside any ethical or moral rose-coloured glasses that you wear. Observe people's habits. Get to know their available resources. Experiment once in a while by dropping a big stone in their path and see how they react (keeping in mind that the "stone" may be an action of yours that contradicts your set of beliefs and habits). Work with a set of computer programmers, with whom no one can connect you, to devise a massively-complex set of scenarios for tracking a large number of the members of our species. Get unsuspecting people to participate in fleshing out the details of one of the scenarios by calling it a game or social networking software. Figure out those who will not participate and set up observation posts to collect information on them, sometimes able to get those who will not participate in computer scenarios to "spy" on each other for you in the analog world.

Again, sit back and relax. Drink a pint of beer or a glass of wine. Treat life as if you're on one long holiday. Get out your pencil sharpener. Grind down a few pencils. Pull out the shavings and glue them together. Place the glued pieces over random newspaper articles from the past. Voila! You have the Book of the Future.

You don't have to believe me. I don't have to believe myself. I'm not trying to get rich from you by selling some snake oil or natural remedy cookbook that the medical authorities don't want you to know about. I'm just a good ol' boy from the hills of east Tennessee who grew up in suburban housing estates. I'm a firm believer in the placebo effect. I like natural opioids. A pile of cash in a hidden offshore account is certainly exhilarating to own but I get my thrills from looking at the changing seasons in the trees outside my window.

People rarely move outside their comfort zones. You can bank on that. Look for those who have insight into the power of crowd manipulation and get to know them so you will have a heads-up where trends are headed. Expect a certain percentage of rising stars to burn out early and fall back. Expect the occasional shooting star to come out of nowhere because you can't see in all directions at once.

That's it. Sit back and relax. Enjoy the show. Every now and then, catch a ride with the circus passing through town and then hitchhike back to your domicile, if you want; some of you will have fun and never go back. Don't forget to take your pencil sharpener, glue, a pair of scissors and a stack of old newspapers with you wherever you go.

See why I don't want to make money off you? I'm telling you the same story told over and over and over again, everyday, all the time. Some of you will be willing to pay a lot of money to believe you're hearing a new story for the very first time (look up P.T. Barnum for why people like that are too vulnerable for me). I don't want your money. I want you to find ways to enjoy yourself without spending your fortune on creating expensive urine or an emperor's new clothes. There are plenty of people out there who want your money - feel free to give them what they want; if that's what you want, then that's what you'll do, with or without me being here telling you the future.

I live in the moment. I can see the future but I can't live there. I reconstruct what I call the past because that's what I was trained to call selective memory but I don't live there, either. One moment at a time. That's all we've got. Either we're happy in the moment or we're not. And now it's the next moment. If you weren't happy before, you can be happy right now, knowing you're you and no one else, free to act with the resources available to you to be who you are meant to be in the moment.

People can change even if they tend not to. You can break the trends of what you were and where you're heading but first see yourself for who you are right now in this moment. You're you, with whatever you're capable of. You can take this moment to decide what to do with your capabilities right now, which change what your capabilities will be in the next moment. And so on.

I've spent the previous moment with you. Time to spend this next moment with my wife, cleaning the roof of fall leaves in preparation to hang winter holiday decorations, a form of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) lighting, if you will. Global leaders will pretend to have control of their countries' destinies even if they have no choice in what they do in this ecumenopolis. When do we stop pretending we're independent countries? Oh well, I already know that answer, don't I, here in the Book of the Future? I call it like I see it. I'm stepping out of the way to let you continue being you, who is part of me who is part of you. Huomiseen!