Humans may be the only species that can imagine an unknown future. But that doesn’t mean we’re any good at it.
We’re routinely wrong about which career we’ll choose, where we’ll end up moving and whom we’ll wind up loving. We fail even more miserably when we try to predict the outcomes of national and global events. Like meteorologists trying to gauge the weather more than a few days out, we just can’t anticipate all the variables and butterfly effects.
In a landmark study, the psychologist Philip Tetlock evaluated several decades of predictions about political and economic events. He found that “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Although skilled forecasters were much better, they couldn’t see around corners. No one could foresee that a driver’s wrong turn would put Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an assassin’s path, precipitating World War I.
Yet a hunch about the future can feel like a certainty because the present is so overwhelmingly, well, present. It’s staring us in the face. Especially in times of great anxiety, it can be all too tempting — and all too dangerous — to convince ourselves the future is just as visible.
In 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I, the Allied powers celebrated. The world was finally returning to peace. They had no idea that the national humiliation of that treaty would sow the seeds of another world war. Just as a tragedy can leave us oblivious to the possibility of silver linings, a triumph can blind us to the prospect of terrible reverberations.
In 2008, Democrats rejoiced at Barack Obama’s victory, unaware of how it would pave the way for the rise of Donald Trump. In 2020, Democrats were thrilled that Joe Biden won, certain that it was the best outcome. But in hindsight, were they right?
Think of how things might have played out if Mr. Trump had won that election. There would have been no big lie. No Jan. 6 insurrection. No Supreme Court doctrine of presidential immunity. Fewer axes to grind and more moderates to temper the president’s worst impulses. And in this year’s presidential campaign, we would have been voting for a new slate of both Republican and Democratic candidates, fully vetted through party primaries. Of course, it’s also possible that even worse things would have happened. There’s no way to know. And that’s precisely the point.
Acknowledging that the future is unknowable can bring some comfort when it feels as if the world is shattered. It can also offer a dose of humility sorely needed in a chaotic world, in which new technologies such as artificial intelligence accelerate the pace of change and make its effects that much harder to guess. Even the Cassandras who manage to anticipate extreme events are usually lucky, not smart; they tend to overweight unlikely scenarios and miss the mark on probable outcomes.
Our struggles to predict the future aren’t limited to events. They apply to our feelings, too. In the heat of the moment, we overindex on our anguish today and underestimate our capacity to adapt tomorrow.
Elections are a perfect case study. In 2008, studies showed that John McCain’s supporters overestimated how unhappy they would be after Mr. Obama won the election. In 2016, when Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton, research revealed that although stress was high among her supporters on election night, their moods started to recover within a day or two. In surveys before and after, liberals reported being depressed only if asked directly about the 2016 election; they didn’t actually end up being more depressed over the next year. Across millions of tweets, negative sentiments about the 2016 election among Democratic voters took only about a week to return to the pre-election base line, and in blue states, there were no increases in Google searches for depression or antidepressant use.
Political defeat is an example of what psychologists call ambiguous loss. We may be mourning the death of our hopes and dreams, but it’s temporary. We forget that unlike people, plans can be resurrected. That was true for Trump supporters in 2020, and it’s true for Democrats now.
Pain and sorrow are never permanent. They evolve over time, and ideally they help us make sense, find meaning and fuel change. As the author and podcaster Nora McInerny put it, “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.”
Ambiguous loss is not a funeral. It’s a reckoning. Like touching a hot stove, it hurts so we don’t miss its lessons. Feeling devastated about an election is a cue to figure out what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again. A sense of righteous indignation can energize us to stand up for our principles. Anxiety about what comes next can help jolt us out of complacency.
It’s unsettling to realize we have no power to predict the future, because it means we aren’t in control of our fate. At the best of times, that can leave us holding our breath. But in the worst of times, embracing uncertainty proves liberating. It reminds us how quickly our fortune can change.
Adam Grant, a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times, is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Think Again” and the host of the TED podcast “Re:Thinking.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
