#149 / No One Knows

On May 24, 2020, the "Sunday Review" section of The New York Times featured this headline on its front cover, along with the image I have put at the top of this blog: 

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN

Mark Lilla's article, which appeared in the center spread, provided this further advice:

We live in a state of radical uncertainty. The first step is to accept it.

The remainder of the "Sunday Review" contained a number of typical "pundits prognosticating" columns, which was pretty ironic, I thought, since the big headline on the first page suggested that predictions are, basically, fruitless. 

Just to reiterate a point I make frequently, sometimes citing to Karl Marx' Theses on Feuerbach, our attempts to "predict" the future are not only fruitless, as Lilla's headline states, but are doubly misguided. Efforts to "predict" the future put us in danger of missing out on what it means to be alive in the first place. The point of life is not to approach life as an "observer," and to try to discern what will happen to us; we must approach life as the "actors" we are, and seek to fashion the realities we create into the future we desire. 

Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-prediction-future.html