Can We Predict The Future?

Oxford dictionary defines ‘destiny’ as: “the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future”. That definition leads to another question: what is the meaning of ‘Future’? Oxford dictionary defines future as: “events that will or are likely to happen in time to come”. To understand what is about to happen in the future, we need to understand what is happening now.

Most of the time, our future depends on what we are doing in the now. For example, I am walking towards the bakery to buy bread, so in the future, I can predict that I will eat the bread that I will be buying. That goes for many of the events that happen every day. We go to work every morning to get a salary at the end of each month. What we spend from that salary will most probably be 80% similar to what we spent our money on in the previous month; especially when it comes to the daily necessities such as grocery shopping, filling the gas, recharging Salik, paying the bills, etc.

That was one simple example of predicting the future. How about we think a little bigger. If we want to know what is going to happen in a country, then we need to study the current events. Who is the president? Who is the vice president? What is the financial situation of the country? Are there any political issues? Were there any dramatic changes in the country in the past few years? With that information, predicting the following sequence of events in that country can be possible.

The same methodology goes for humans by answering questions like: where does that person work? What does he do for a living? How passionate is he about his job? What are his priorities in life? How driven is he? And so on. If predicting the future is considered easy, then why do we say that only the great God knows what is going to happen in the future?

The answer to that question comes back to knowledge. To know a person’s complete accurate future, we need to understand more than a person’s personality, behavior, plans, passions and dreams. To expand this theory further, we need to include the influence of society, the weather, the political situation of the country, the people he gets influenced by, what is on TV, what he eats, what are the trends in his community, who are his best friends, and the full understanding of every person that person interacted with and might interact with.

The world is a large factory and we are the small pieces in that large machine. We play a small role in that machine but our small actions contribute to that large factory.

In conclusion, we get back to the main question: can we predict the future? The answer is both yes and no.

-Yes, we can predict our future according to what we do now and what we are seeking on a daily basis; because when we want something really bad and work hard for it, the world opens new doors to fulfill the dreams we have. However, we also need to consider external factors that we have no control over.

-No, we can’t predict the future because we don’t have the capability, the knowledge and the understanding of the bigger picture and how everything around us operates. Which reminds me of what the therapist/author David Richo said: “We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.”

If you asked me about my opinion, then I will focus on predicting my future by working everyday to reach what I really seek in life. Working on the now is the road to see the result in the future.