Week Five: Stop Divining the Future
If you’re like most people on planet earth, the uncertainty of the future and what people are thinking causes a great deal of anxiety. And for some this anxiety can be debilitating. I know because I’ve struggled with it. Humans are fragile creatures—that’s surprising to think about but without our technology we would be another animal’s midday snack. This primes our brain to seek out information from around us to best predict what level of alert we should be at. For our complicated, densely social and technological lives this alert system is outdated and can even be detrimental. This anxiety alert system starts to invest a lot of time in predicting the future and mind reading. What do I mean by these two behaviors? Well the first is about predicting or anticipating events. The second is about predicting and anticipating what a person is thinking. In both cases, we’re usually wrong. In fact, humans make very poor predictors precisely because we live with such high thresholds of anxiety...