The Future, Backwards

There is a soft lie that we are told in childhood: that time moves forward like a river, that we are carried on its surface, always downstream. But anyone who has listened closely to the silence between transactions, or stood still in the afterglow of a disappearing lover, knows better.
The future leans backwards. It reaches its hand into the present. And some days, it rearranges the past.

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In economics they call them derivatives. Options. Futures. Contracts written not on things as they are, but on what they may become.
They are not instruments of the present moment. They are promises inscribed on paper, like spells whispered by someone who has never seen the thing they’re describing.

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Imagine: a bushel of wheat, not yet planted, is bought and sold. A barrel of oil, still buried in darkness beneath rock and ocean, is assigned a value. That value is not determined by the sun or the soil or the sweat of the farmer, but by a theory.
A theory of the future.

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The strange trick is this: those theoretical futures alter the present. They seep backwards like blood through a bandage.
A rise in projected demand inflates the current price, which shifts production schedules, reorients shipping routes, and changes the farmer’s sleep.
Suddenly, the future is not far away. It is here, in your bowl of rice, in the plastic bags beneath your sink.

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The future becomes the organizing principle. A dream that disciplines the body.
Not a destination, but a yoke.

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And then the past, that old broken photograph, begins to blur.
Because when the present is reorganized by the future, the stories we tell ourselves about what led us here begin to shift.
It is not just that our choices were influenced by the futures we imagined.
It is that those imagined futures changed the terrain we stood on, and thus rewrote the story of how we got here.

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In this way, the future changes the present. The present changes the past. And we live inside a loop, pretending it’s a line.

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I once loved a woman who said she couldn’t stay unless I stopped predicting what would happen between us. She said it like a prayer, or a warning.
But I had already priced our next argument. I had already felt the recession of her warmth before it happened. Even in the moment of our closeness, I was hedging.

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In financial terms, this is called managing risk. In love, it is called fear. In memory, it is called distortion.

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We assume the present has weight. That it is real, and that the future is only a ghost.
But in the markets, the ghost is more powerful. The price of a thing today is not only what it is worth now, but what it might be worth tomorrow.
And so the ghost grows claws.

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The ghost tells the present what to do. It tells the farmer when to plant. It tells the company when to shut its doors. It tells the mother what to fear for her child.

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We imagine we are walking into the future. But perhaps the future is a shadow walking into us.
Perhaps it already knows what we are going to decide, and is only waiting for us to discover the story it has written for us in invisible ink.

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It is not only money that functions this way. We construct entire identities around the futures we are betting on.
A child says, “I want to be a doctor,” and the adults begin shaping her days. She is handed a book instead of a brush. She is enrolled in classes that fracture her sleep.
She becomes her own derivative… a present self priced on a possible tomorrow.

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Even our governments do not live in the now. They act in accordance with predictions; of inflation, of unrest, of demographic shifts, of war.
Policy is not the shape of the present; it is the shadow of a future imagined
by men in closed rooms.

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And so the future haunts us.
Not like a memory.
Like a debt.

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What happens, then, when the imagined future fails to arrive? When the wheat rots in the silos? When the oil spills before it can be used? When the child discovers she is not a doctor, but a painter with trembling hands?

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What happens is that the past cracks. The story we told ourselves about why we chose this path dissolves. Regret appears. Confusion.
A revaluation of memory.

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And still, we keep writing futures. We cannot stop.
We have been taught that risk is manageable, that uncertainty is simply a puzzle we haven’t solved yet.
But perhaps uncertainty is not a puzzle. Perhaps it is the only truth that exists.

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To live in the present, truly, would be to let go of the futures we have priced into our days. To walk into a room without calculating how we might leave it. To love someone without planning our exit strategy. To eat the wheat without knowing the market value of grain.

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But we are not built that way. Or we have been unbuilt, and rebuilt otherwise.
We are creatures of speculation. We forecast our own lives like weather. We pray for rain and prepare for flood.

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I still find myself waking up some mornings and checking the price of oil.
Not because I use it. Not because I trade. But because I want to know what someone, somewhere, thinks the world will become.
And I confuse that guess with truth.

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I think of that woman sometimes. How she stood near the door. How I had already imagined her leaving before she touched the handle.
And how, in some cruel way, my belief in her departure helped summon it.

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We speak of time as if we were its passengers. But sometimes I think we are only mirrors.
The future walks toward us and we show it back to itself. We twist ourselves into new shapes to fulfill a promise of our own imagination.