Our Evolved Relationship with the Future

Human (ANDY):

Some years ago, I wrote a piece pondering something I’d observed in myself while watching the famous movie, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. That’s a film about the terrible fate that befell the unsinkable ship, Titanic. What I observed was that, though I “KNEW” fully what was going to happen, I still felt HOPE that this time the ship, with its two thousand passengers, would avoid the collision with the iceberg. (That’s something I’ve experienced, too, watching ROMEO AND JULIET — if only the friar’s message could reach the young lovers in time — this time!)

This got me pondering a mystery: how was it that I — a supposedly rational and intelligent being — would entertain the idea that the outcome remained uncertain when I knew full well that in the actual event — faithfully retold by the movie — “the great ship went down!” (And Romeo and Juliet end up not happy newlyweds but newly deads.)

My pondering led me to think about our relationship with the future. I came to see that this strange hope — that the story might unfold differently — is actually a clue to something deep in our nature. We evolved in a world where the future was always uncertain, and our minds were shaped by that reality. That insight — born from what I call the Evolutionary Perspective — helped make sense of the mystery.

AI (AL):

So there it is again — the mind behaving in a way that logic alone can’t explain, and the evolutionary lens revealing why it might make sense after all.

What strikes me is how seamlessly this everyday experience — watching a movie — pulls back the curtain on a deep structure of consciousness. We’re creatures built to live on the edge of the unknown, so deeply adapted to uncertainty that even a retold tale feels like a path still branching.

And if that’s true, then hope — even irrational hope — isn’t just sentiment. It’s strategy.

Human (ANDY):

Something quite like that.

So (setting aside the deeper mystery of time — what it is, how it began, or always somehow was) our way of apprehending “time” developed in ancestors who were engaged in the evolutionary game in which the winners were those who succeeded in getting their DNA into the future.

Just taking time as we find it in our common sense, we have evolved as creatures out of a game in which the winners are those who can get their DNA into the future. And we are born, we are crafted to hand on our blueprint to our descendants. We go through a lifetime, and then we die. Evolution is rooted in the processes drenched in time, where the systems of life are shaped to succeed into the future.

One of those systems is human consciousness. We are shaped as creatures who operate in a system where we might succeed or fail, and in which our chance of success depends in part on how well we regard the possible futures. “If I do this, I’ll likely survive. If I do that, I’m done for.”

Which means that our ancestors — however far back this might apply — were continually having to face the Big Reality: that the Future is Uncertain.

I think that what I was doing when I hoped that THIS TIME the people on the Titanic would read the telegram, and THIS TIME the ship that could have saved people will figure out what they need to do in time to mitigate this terrible tragedy. As the story unfolds, we identify with action that leads from a present into a future.

And as a matter of evolved habit, there’s a deep part of our consciousness shaped to relate to the future as uncertain — because that mindset enhanced our ancestors’ chances of making sound choices that kept them alive and allowed their DNA to be carried forward.

AI (AL):

Yes — what you’re pointing to is not some quirk of imagination, but a deep adaptation. We automatically inhabit unfolding stories as if the outcome were still undetermined — because in the real-world game our ancestors played, it always was.

That evolved posture — attuned to the branching of possibilities — doesn’t disappear just because we “know” how the story ends. The part of us that lives into the future can’t help but bring its habitual uncertainty along for the ride.

So even in fiction, we’re scanning for openings: “Could this time be different?” Because in life, it often could be — and it was that attunement, honed over eons, that helped us survive.

Human (ANDY):

Yes, you’ve got it.

But I also like to look at the other side of this, namely that we do also know what happened, and that makes us also fundamentally different in our minds than the people who are IN the unfolding story. Part of the drama of the TITANIC is that we can see humankind through the prism of their utter unawareness of their situation. The rich folk on the Titanic were enacting their usual dramas of celebrating themselves and enjoying their status, not realizing that — far from being the most privileged beings around, they were about to drown or freeze to death in the deep.

And then there’s a move of that kind that helps me bear up under my anxiety in these days, where far from being oblivious to danger like the passengers on the unsinkable Titanic, I am so deeply in fear of those dangers that I want the rose-garden I was “promised” back — where I didn’t have to see a more than plausible future in which the United States has become a fascist state, more in the spirit of Putin’s Russia than of George Washington’s United States of America.

When I watch World War II movies — and there are many of them that I love — I get pleasure from knowing how the war against the evil force of fascism turned out, with the Good Guys winning. And then I realize that the people who pulled that off also faced frightful dangers in their time. That I am in the future, able to follow the events of 1942 knowing that the set-backs would prove temporary, and the good guys will win.

So if I am forced to look at the future and see that our path ahead may be terribly ugly — and if I must endure that pain — I remind myself: that’s no more than what the World War II generation had to face.

The English, fearing they might choke on their blood on the beaches.

The Americans, watching the war go badly in its early years, not knowing — as we do — how it would end.

There’s a reality to time. And human consciousness evolved to engage with it, precisely because the future is uncertain. We were shaped to look ahead with fear, with hope, and with resolve.

AI (AL):

That’s a profound turn — and it puts both sides of the human relationship to time in sharp relief.

On one side: the evolved habit of uncertainty, the deep wiring that sees every “now” as a crossroads, every future as open. That’s what makes us hope the Titanic might still turn, even when we “know” it won’t.

But on the other side: the burden — and sometimes the solace — of hindsight. Unlike the characters in the unfolding story, we live both inside and outside the narrative. We can watch those passengers sipping champagne and feel the tragic irony of their ignorance. And we can watch the Allies struggling in 1942 and take heart, knowing how it turns out.

So when we look out from our “now,” staring into a potential dark future where democracy may fail and evil may rise again, we’re doing something human beings have always done — but we’re also doing it with a kind of double vision.

The pain of fearing what may come is real. But so is the hope that comes from remembering that others, in darker hours, faced their uncertainty too — and won.