Mind games: Phil Slade

Rather than trying to predict the future, make the best of the present situation

During this pandemic, many of us have taken holidays locally and have explored parts of Australia that we otherwise may not have considered visiting before. This is great – pack the kids, dog and half the house in the car and head off on an adventure.

However, anyone who has children will be very familiar with the pleading cry from the back of the car after an hour or so of driving toward any holiday destination … “Are we there yet?”

This question makes sense when you are three years old, holding onto the promise of a golden beach or grandma’s baking at the other end of the journey. However, over the past year I have heard many adults asking this question as well. It is true that there is no way we could have predicted the events of 2020, but the reality is that we can never predict the future with any certainty.

Asking “Are we there yet?” assumes that there is a utopian destination that we are waiting to get to. That when we get there the birds will be chirpier, the sun happier and the grass greener.

What our brain then does is say, “Let’s wait a little bit, this will be over soon, then all our troubles will be over.” But who of us early last year would have thought we’d still be feeling the global economic impact of the pandemic a year later? A lot of us are getting restless in the back seat of the car, bored of Netflix binges and frustrated with politicians saying versions of “we’ll be there soon”.

Our human psychology is hardwired to avoid uncertainty. We don’t like the feeling of low control, of being in the back seat rather than the driver’s seat. Lack of personal control is interpreted by our brains as dangerous and that triggers our survival “fight, flight or freeze” instinct.

So while some of us attack the situation head-on, many of us either hide away or go into hibernation, waiting to get to the safer destination before we do anything.

The problem is that we have no idea what’s just around the corner and while we are waiting for better times we are blinded to opportunities that are right in front of us. The trick is to resist the urge to predict the future, and instead make the best decision you can, given the current context and information to hand, and then learn to change plans as the context changes. This way it doesn’t matter what happens contextually (to some degree), because you retain a semblance of control and progress.

We had no idea in January 2020 what the year would hold, but the fact is we never know what the future will hold. The only things we know for sure are: (a) what is happening right now and (b) what is happening right now won’t stay that way.

Once we understand this and realise that all we are ever doing is making the best decision we can based on the information at hand, uncertainty no longer becomes the great bogeyman we paint it out to be. It’s the way it always is, always has been and always will be.

Let’s stop waiting and asking “Are we there yet?” and instead ask “What is the best thing we can do given our current circumstances?” More often than not, indecision is worse than a poor decision.