I often find myself thinking about the future. It’s not always in an anxious manner, either. I could simply be envisioning my college dorm room and where I might live in ten years or the email I need to compose to send my boss. Sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming and lead to feelings of loss of control, that I am completely consumed by my mind and its thoughts about things that aren’t even relevant to what’s happening here, in the now.
Summer Allen from UC Berkeley shares her insight on this topic in a white paper titled “Future-Mindedness.” This innate ability everyone has to consider the future and posit what it might be like is called “prospection” or “future-mindedness.” Prospection can be defined in many different ways, ranging from the ability to “pre-experience the future by simulating it in our minds,” to imagining alternatives, or even just the simple act of thinking about the future. It turns out that what I often perceive to be a strange and unsettling experience of spending what feels like every waking moment thinking about my future is expected of any person, but especially of one in my current life stage. I’m graduating high school in three months; going off to college to live on my own; and will likely live on my own in the next ten years. It’s hard to know what to make of it all when you’re still only 17.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to spend more time consciously focusing on the present moment and savoring the little things: a takeout dinner with my parents, a walk with my dogs, my drive to school, or a coffee with friends. I find this helps me dampen the anxious feelings and the uptick in prospection. Allen also mentioned that prospection begins development in early childhood and continues throughout adolescence, peaking at around age 21. After that, it declines with age. Right now, it feels like the world is reticent, withholding some sort of secret from me. It’s somewhat of a comfort to know that in ten years a lot of the things in my life will become more concrete. The future I’m currently thinking about will no longer be an omnipresent, unforeseen, abstract concept that I’m unable to grasp because…I’ll be living it.
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