The Future is a Lie

I posted a few days ago about the past being a lie. For the same reasons, the future is a lie, too.

We take our memories, which we treat as the truth, and project them onto the future. A bad encounter, a relationship gone sour (we love the bad experiences for this), a friendship that ended in tears—we take patterns from those experiences and project them onto the future, believing that any encounter we have is a replay of that negative experience.

We try to force the future to resemble the past.

The problem, of course, is that our memories are unreliable. The past did not happen as we remember it, and we tend to focus on the most negative experiences out of many, trying to avoid a repeat of those experiences.

The problem is that universe does not have to resemble our expectations. The mind will actively reinterpret whatever we see into a pattern we recognize, even when what’s happening and what we remember have nothing in common.

Why?

Because it comforts us. It makes us feel better to believe that whatever we think happened to us in the past is a guide to a safe future. We’d rather be safely miserable than experience something unsafe and unpredictable.

Your past is a lie. Your future is, too. You have only now, each now slipping away as it happens.

Anything else is you trying to comfort yourself by robbing yourself of any opportunity for joy.