No one knows what the future holds. But you know what you're capable of.

"We must confess that at present the rich predominate, but the future will be for the virtuous and ingenious." — Jean de la Bruyère, 1688

Last week, I acknowledged the strange times that we're currently experiencing.

No one quite knows what to make of it; and yet, amid the hoarders, price gougers and foot-draggers, we're seeing companies making decisions for the common good.

For most people though, there's a lot of fear and even existential dread, rooted in uncertainty.

The future is always uncertain, but it's usually centered around specific risks rather than vague and amorphous uncertainties.

Throughout history, as humans faced other harsh challenges such as daily hunts for food, unpredictable natural disasters and weather, and invasion by enemies such as tribes and tuberculosis, we figured that our fate was in the hands of the gods.

Eventually, we got beyond that thinking and took our fate into our own hands.

In Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter Bernstein points out that the future had to be something other than “the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers” before it could be put “in the service of the present.”

The Industrial Revolution and more recently the Tech Revolution (particularly through the lens of A.I.) insulated us from what seemed like such primitive doubts. Humankind was thought to be in control, to the extent that we could wrest back from Mother Nature that which we had heretofore damaged.

And therein lies the missing link right now: Control.

Are you a control freak? I suspect many of us are.

Not necessarily in a paralyzing way. But in the sense that we need to feel like we're calling the shots before we can make progress.

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