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Do We Think Too Much About the Future? | The New Yorker

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For most of history, people didn’t try predicting the future. Maybe that was wise.

Save this story Save this story You’re reading Open Questions , Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human. If you had lived in the early decades of the sixteenth century, how would you have thought about the future? Presumably, you would have considered it in everyday terms: you would have wondered whether it would rain tomorrow, speculated about what might happen in your town over the summer, and hoped to get married someday. But, in other respects, your approach to the future might have been unusual, at least by our modern lights. If you were religious—and who wasn’t

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