Among the more remarkable accomplishments of Homo sapiens is its ability to occupy time not yet experienced.
This adaptation appears almost unique.
Many species anticipate.
Humans schedule.
The distinction is considerable.
Observed communities devote extraordinary effort to constructing detailed representations of futures that have not occurred.
Forecasts.
Scenarios.
Visions.
Roadmaps.
Strategic plans.
Election promises.
Five-year programmes.
Ten-year strategies.
Twenty-five-year transformations.
Centenary commemorations are occasionally planned before the first participants have been born.
The confidence displayed throughout this activity is anthropologically fascinating.
Researchers initially assumed these documents existed to predict the future.
Long-term observation suggests a rather different function.
They enable coordinated action in the present.
Whether the predicted future eventually arrives appears almost secondary.
This should not be regarded as failure.
Human beings rarely require accurate futures.
They require shared futures.
The distinction explains much.
One especially elegant adaptation concerns uncertainty itself.
Strategic plans routinely acknowledge that circumstances may change.
They nevertheless proceed to describe subsequent decades with admirable precision.
This apparent contradiction causes participants surprisingly little discomfort.
The anthropologist suspects that confidence concerning direction compensates psychologically for uncertainty concerning destination.
Communities also exhibit recurring rituals surrounding prediction.
Experts are invited.
Models are constructed.
Probabilities are assigned.
Confidence intervals are calculated.
Recommendations are formulated.
When events later diverge from expectation, the models are refined.
Confidence generally survives intact.
The process recommences.
One should resist interpreting this as intellectual stubbornness.
The activity performs an essential social function.
Without collectively imagined futures, large-scale coordination would become extraordinarily difficult.
Civilisations would struggle to build cities, educate children, fund research, or organise retirement.
The future is not merely awaited.
It is administratively inhabited.
Particularly intriguing is the species' treatment of disappointment.
Predictions frequently prove inaccurate.
This rarely diminishes enthusiasm for prediction itself.
Instead, communities conclude that the previous forecast employed an insufficiently sophisticated methodology.
A revised methodology is developed.
It predicts with renewed confidence.
Future anthropologists will evaluate the results.
The cycle continues.
One phenomenon deserves special attention.
Humans often speak of "preparing for the future."
Closer examination suggests they are usually preparing for one particular future.
Alternative futures receive considerably less administrative attention.
Reality occasionally selects one of these.
Participants then describe the outcome as unexpected.
The anthropologist records the description without disagreement.
Perhaps the most revealing observation concerns hope.
Beneath the forecasts, the scenarios, the roadmaps and the strategic visions lies something rather more ancient.
The species appears unwilling to believe that tomorrow should arrive entirely uninvited.
It therefore imagines tomorrow repeatedly.
Sometimes accurately.
Often creatively.
Always collectively.
This may be one of civilisation's quieter achievements.
The future, after all, does not yet exist.
Nevertheless, millions of people routinely cooperate on the assumption that it eventually will.
Field Note 22:
Human beings demonstrate an unusual capacity to coordinate around events that have not yet occurred.
Field Note 23:
Shared futures appear to be socially more important than accurate futures.
Field Note 24:
Participants consistently mistake failed predictions for evidence that prediction requires further refinement rather than reduced confidence.
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