Friday, April 29, 2016

Foresight

Many want to know the future and that explains the market for fortune-tellers. Let us assume that we have a real fortune-teller who can exactly tell the future. Will that help us? The common answer will be yes, we will be more prepared for what is coming. However there is a small misunderstanding in this. In true sense if someone is with foresight then she can see what is going to happen. Nothing can change it. Because if you can change it then it is not happening then the forecast goes wrong! So let us accept that prediction by a genuine person will always happen.

Now let us analyse the two characters of a forecast. Either it is a good thing (that will happen) or a bad thing. If it is a good thing then we know it beforehand. It takes away all the fun, is not it? There is no surprise factor and hence no real joy in left in it.

And if the event predicted is a negative one then we worry about it from now (even when it has not happened) and our time till that event is miserable or at least not as joyful as it could have been. Again the lack of the surprise factor makes it worse.

So ultimately we can conclude that a foresight is a useless thing to go for.