Positive outlook into the future

Illustration credit Angie Pine

How to learn to love your uncertain future

It came up during a psychotherapy session. There is nothing I look forward to in 2025, I said. Over the past year, I went on three dates and every single one of them  blocked me after the first encounter over a cup of coffee. I don’t have kids or pets but my anxiety and overthinking keeps me up at night. Coming to the office, tired from the sleepless nights, I was not as bursting with excitement as the manager would have liked me to. Your face expresses carelessness, she concluded, and I lost the job I hated and the paycheck I loved tenderly. My hairdresser raised his prices twice in twelve months. I can hardly afford a haircut, let alone a vacation. 

‘What to look forward to?’ I exclaimed. 

‘Search for a positive side,’ my therapist replied. ‘One needs hope like a ship needs a destination. Find something thrilling, however improbable, find something to aim for, however small’. 

With that she signed off and I put learning to love the future on my to-do list.

Perhaps my inborn pessimism is obscuring my vision, I thought. It’s better to ask around before concluding that negativity about the future is a widespread trend. I bought some limoncello and chocolate (yes, she likes that combination) and went to see my friend. Anouk, her husband Bram, and their four children (all girls) live in Amerongen. They got lucky and found a home on the social housing market. But it was back in times when only their oldest daughter had been born. With four children the house is too small and they cannot afford to buy a bigger one because Anouk has 40K in student loans and the family’s monthly expenses are tightly covered by their two incomes. None of the banks will approve our mortgage applications, she said. 

‘The prices are increasing year by year,’ Anouk said. ‘I don’t need statistics to feel it in my wallet. And it’s time to start saving money for the girls’ education.’

I spent that evening listening to stories about their neighbour’s smoking, having smelly barbeques till four in the morning, about the dog of another neighbour barking the whole day because no one lets it out. My plan was to direct the conversation into New Year resolutions, plans, and dreams but I decided to save it for another time. 

Dispirited by my meeting with Anouk, I called my cousin Elen who is a wonderful graphic designer. She works as a freelancer and always seemed to be a free and happy spirit to me.

‘What are you excited about in 2025?’ I asked almost too abruptly. 

‘About AI,’ Elen replied.

‘Does it help you with your work?’ I said, swallowing the bait.

‘Immensely. My clients trust it so much, they won’t listen to what I say about visual composition and colours.’

‘So, is it a good thing?’ I asked gingerly, smelling the sarcasm this time. 

‘Yes, it’s the best friend to all who cannot draw,’ she replied.

I learned from her words that the Covid-19 pandemic increased the number of freelancers by many folds and established a preference for working online for good. Today, someone living and paying taxes in Belgium has to compete with freelancers from Belarus, India, and Brazil with much lower hourly rates. Generative AI convinced many of her clients that they could manage the idea generation process by themselves. They come with a picture and ask her to tidy it up, she shared. When I asked Elen about the future, she was vague and doubtful. I left thinking that the creative field wasn’t ever an easy one to work at.

It was time to change tactics. Of course, people tell me about their personal problems but those are just particular cases. I need to look broader. How do I find out how we feel about the future, as a society? Politics. The ruling class, the officials are paid to develop an idea we are moving towards as a country. They have debated quite a lot since the election. But when I read the strategic plan published on the last Prinsjesdag, I saw what we are fighting against but not what for. The plan was to take less tax money from the low-income group. We are fighting against poverty. The government intended to give more money to the army and the police. Fighting against terrorists and other threats. They increased taxation for all the cultural events and products: musea, theatre, concerts, sports, books. The VAT for books increased from 9 to 21 percent. Fighting against the last sources of joy in our lives. What are we aiming for? Equality? Freedom? Progress? From the published plans I could only divine that the NL is going to be a guarded citadel with strict immigration policies and expensive entertainment for those who can afford it. 

⚈ I found none of the optimistic perspectives I was looking for.

✧ But why should we have any excitement about the future? Maybe my therapist is wrong and it’s just normal to be afraid of it?

Uncertainty of future events has dreadful effects on us. Randomness of good and bad luck is immensely hard to process, so much that we rather attribute it to anything however ephemeral: fortune, God’s will, fate, destiny, astrology, being cursed at birth. There are reasons to be scared. However, if we all simultaneously get overpowered by fear in the face of the unknown, humanity stops existing. Hope for the better enables us to get through any but especially dark times. That’s why my therapist insisted on finding positive things to look forward to.

Besides new personal chances, discoveries, wins to anticipate in the future, we (as a collective we) have formative experiences of new equalling better in our lives. 

✧ We grew up watching progress change the world.

One can remember a time with payphones and not enough change to make a call. Think of the day when you went on vacation to Rome and bought a paper map in a tourist office to navigate around. It was bulky and hard to read, no GPS, you got lost three times a day, couldn’t ask for help because you didn’t speak Italian and Google Translate wasn’t invented yet. 

Or when you spent two hours waiting for a date who didn’t show up. You imagined all different scenarios: she forgot about the date, was kidnapped, run over by a bus, confused the destination with another similarly named cafe, her cat got sick. Just like that, two hours and three cups of coffee went by. You didn’t have a mobile phone to call her with, to check her online status or if she already blocked you on Tinder.

New materials, new technologies, better devices appear on the market every year. This positive trend existed for as far as you can read in history books.

Coming back to my search for a positive picture of the future. What I found instead was the increased popularity of the Golden Age mentality. It isn’t new. There’s always a group of people that has nostalgia as a major emotional driving force. Everything was better before, you might hear from them. The grass was greener, the food was healthier. Those are usually people of the older generation, who feel somewhat outlandish in the changing world. From the uncomfortable present, they look back at their past with love. But during the years when inflation suddenly jumps to ten per cent, the rent of a studio apartment is no longer affordable to two working adults, and every television programme screams of a new crisis on a daily basis, the golden age mentality easily spreads to all age, education, and social status groups.

✧ How did we come to this state of affairs?

My theory is that we underestimate the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis. Its influences over social life are waiting to be analysed. One thing that happened (which you probably remember) is the government drawing everyone’s attention. A person who had never voted, had close to zero political preferences, quickly learned the names of our ministers (especially, Mr. Hugo de Jonge). Covid-19 press conferences became the most watched—and discussed—TV show. As a result, millions of people looked at their government,  becoming perplexed and horrified by the officials’ incompetence. That image was impossible to erase. Those are the people who are supposed to be planning our prosperous future. I see a reason as to doubt whether we’d get any place happy.

✧ What if the golden age mentality is the most objective view today?

Yes, the cost of living keeps growing year after year. What we see in the news are endless political disagreements, conflicts, wars, and destruction. We lived through the Covid-19 crisis, energy crisis, housing crisis,... Let’s pause here, I don’t want to list all the crises we went through since 2020, it’s too depressing. One thing they all have in common is our government’s utter inability to work against their impact. Since Covid-19 we are watching them more closely, partly in misbelief that someone so incompetent is allowed to work there, partly with hope that they will do something good (even if by chance or mistake). So, objectively…. Hey, wait. I doubt an objective view exists. I say it doesn’t. One individual with a fixed monthly paycheck perceives high inflation as an adverse event, but there are people profiting from it. What we call disaster is personal (in many cases subjective).

The golden age mentality gains popularity on the Internet because it’s easy to ride the wave of negative emotions. It attracts attention. It resonates. 

✧ What does it mean for me personally?

It’s easy to internalise the ubiquitous feeling of gloom and doom and forget that the future is personal. With the exception of a nuclear catastrophe scenario that would exterminate all life on the planet, we have different resources and plans. Losing a job today might lead to a better job tomorrow. The world we live in is immensely complex. That’s why social, political, and economic events do not directly reflect on an individual's life. But the newscasters will try to scare you anyway.

✧ How to find a positive outlook into the future?

There are ways. I’ve heard of people who always have a booked vacation to anticipate (not my case). There are people who buy too many books to anticipate reading them (my case). I don’t want to tell you to enjoy the small things in life. I hate those gurus and call them aggressive optimists (aggressive because they encourage you to suppress negative emotions). I'll only share my approach. Take it or leave it.

1. Restrict news consumption. Daily news is always 99 percent noise and only 1 percent useful information. If something out of the ordinary happens, you will learn about it from people. I call this rule my information hygiene practice. As you wash hands before eating, avoid news feeds before breakfast and after dinner. Want to listen to something during your lunch break? Put on a podcast or some music.

2. Limit your presence on social media. Places like the social media channel formerly known as Twitter, Facebook and many others are full of hate speech and trolls. It’s better for your mental health not to read about who called whom a fool, and what people say in the comment section.

3. Find a personal goal to work towards. The best is to find something achievable within a year and which brings you joy. It could be about improving your language skills up a level, reading on a specific topic, finding a new job or a lover, or making a new flower bed in your garden.

4. Remind yourself of the positive side of uncertainty. What isn’t certain can turn into something good (with about fifty percent probability1). The future still has positive potential, it always does.

5. Learn about non-linear processes. Our mind, like many public speakers, likes simplifications. We see a chain of negatively charged events and draw a line to the horizon, along which only more negative events will follow. However, in social life, the majority of processes develop in a non-linear manner. What seems like a recline today might be a pause before a quick leap forward.

During my next psychotherapy session, I spent only seventy-five per cent of the time crying over my lost job and low spirits, the remaining fifteen minutes I proudly showed my therapist some nude sketches I made and my new books on human anatomy for artists. My goal is to improve my drawing skills. What are you looking forward to in 2025?