The Perfect Potential

The future is a tricky subject. No matter how much you try to observe it, try to predict it, you’re going to fail – be it to a greater or later extent. Today I had my psych appointment who asked me where I thought I would be in 5 years time. It’s a question I’ve always hated because I think its shite. See, what you think could happen in the future is potentially true, as well as it is potentially false. All the happiness and all of the sadness holds in the future is potential, and frankly, potential is shite.

So I gave her a pre-prepared answer because it’s just one of those default/convention questions that everyone hates but do it anyway, like how are you? About 7 times in your life you end up regretting asking the question (like when I ended up patting the shoulder of a colleague who burst into a tirade of tears during my work experience when I was 15. I bet she thought that wasn’t where she wasn’t going to end up at her age...) I say I’m going to be a successful journalist, or I’ll be on my gap year, gutting fish and learning Icelandic with Ria, or will I be completely down and out? It’s all shite in the end because I don’t know the future and it scares the hell out of me.

Reading this article, thinking about the breakdown of the church, and with the world becoming the neo-revisionist hellhole with a corporate brand on its ass I can’t help but feel that human nature has progressed so far all we can go is down and out. I remember all of these tacky Tomorrow World shows where the future was shiny and happy and everyone lived for ever and that was a good thing and there was World Peace – the world had the anti-climatic ending and didn’t end with a blazing sunset (from all the pollution). The future seemed so bright it was one of literary’s academic purposes to present a negative future which was way ahead in the future. Now all of these future ideas have the piss being taken out of them; it’s supposed to be a rational time, right? But now the future in these articles are so negative, it seems different to the horror over rock and roll somehow – whats left to progress in culture? Am I an old fuddy, or is the fate of the human race really and truly in the hands of computer peeps and scientists with syringes? Are we now going to have literate that saves us from our horrible potential future? Or am I talking shite?

I am guilty of reading horoscopes because sometimes they’re right and its always nice to have someone making all the decisions that I won’t have live my over, and they’re fun anyways. Yet, for 2006 I’ve been all over the net and I can’t find a coherent prediction for 2006, and it unsettles me for some reason, as if this year fate really is in my year, of all years where my life can go one way or another – my mind could crumble, I could fall into my eating disorders, or my depression (again) or my alcoholism. I could do not so well on my A levels and not get into university. Or I might meet somebody (I’ve been wondering if I’m going to fall in love with anyone anytime soon because I feel loveless and its twisting my heart like rags. Or it could all go right, and this will be the real beginning to the rest of my life. I’m not entirely sure why I’m sitting here, waiting, panicking, blogging about it.