What Would You Do If You Knew the Future? (Less Than You Think)

What would you do if you knew the future? Ask anyone and the first answer comes back before you've finished the question: win the lottery. Maybe back a horse. Buy a pile of shares in some small, unfashionable company that turns out to own the next decade. It's a lovely fantasy and it takes about four seconds, because it's the fantasy of never having to worry about money again, dressed up as time travel.

Then, if you let the silence run, the second answer arrives. Warn someone. Save someone. Stop the thing that happened to that person you still think about.

And then, if you leave it long enough, there's a third answer, the one people say more quietly: I'm not sure I'd want to know.

I think that third answer is the most honest of the three, and the interesting part is working out why.

Foreknowledge is a cache, and every write invalidates it. Knowing the future is only useful if you act on it. But the moment you act, you change the conditions that produced the future you knew about. Your knowledge is a snapshot of a system you are now actively modifying. It's stale data. The first bet is safe. The fifth is a little less safe. By the time you've quietly become a millionaire, bought the house, told your friends to buy the shares and moved to a different town, the world your notes describe is drifting away from the one you're standing in.

This is the bit the lottery fantasy skips. Foreknowledge is at its most valuable when you don't use it, and you only ever wanted it so you could use it. It's a map that redraws itself every time you take a step.

The money problem is the easy one. Say you're sensible about it. Small bets, spread out, nothing that attracts attention. Fine. That probably works, for a while, and it's the part of the fantasy that holds up best. But notice how quickly it stops being interesting. Once the money's sorted, the money stops mattering, and you're left holding everything else you know. That's where it gets heavy.

The people problem is the hard one. Knowing the future means knowing things about the people you love. Who gets ill. Which marriage doesn't last. Which friend moves away and stops calling. What do you do with that?

You could tell them. But there is no way to say trust me, I know what's coming that doesn't sound unhinged, and even if they believed you, you would have handed them a weight they never asked to carry. Or you could keep quiet and try to steer things from the side, which turns every conversation into a small manipulation. Either way the knowledge puts a pane of glass between you and everyone else. You're in the room, but you're also watching it from somewhere else.

The Greeks had a name for this. Cassandra could see the future and nobody would believe her, and it didn't make her powerful. It made her lonely.

Most people, it turns out, would rather not know. This isn't just a hunch. In 2017 the psychologists Gerd Gigerenzer and Rocio Garcia-Retamero asked people whether they'd want to know about future events in their own lives, and the large majority said no to the bad ones, like when or how their partner would die. A surprising number didn't want advance notice of the good ones either. They called it Cassandra's regret, which is a very good name for a very reasonable instinct. We say we want certainty. What we actually want is hope, and certainty is hope's natural predator.

So what would you really do? I think the honest answer is: a couple of small, practical things, one or two big ones, and then you'd spend the rest of the time trying to work out what the knowledge was for.

Because that's the quiet trick hidden inside the question. Asking what you'd do if you knew the future is really asking what you think matters. The lottery answer tells you what you're anxious about. The rescue answer tells you who you love. And the pause before the third answer tells you something about how much of life's value lives in not knowing: the phone call you didn't see coming, the person who walked into the wrong room at the right time.

The most useful thing a list of future results could give you isn't the results. It's the priorities that fall out when you realise the results aren't enough.

A novel about this

That's the engine of Need a Little Time. Jamie Newgent is a software developer whose life comes apart in 2019. His wife has been having an affair, his business is gone, and he retreats to a small flat in a tower block with a spiral staircase that really shouldn't be there. At the top of it, it's February 1990, and living there is Anna.

Jamie does exactly what a tech-literate man with a portal would do: he loads an iPad with everything he can gather about the decades to come and takes it with him. It's the ultimate cheat sheet. But the book is a time travel romance, not a heist, and it's far more interested in the question underneath the fantasy: when you know what's coming, what do you actually want to change? If you've ever pondered the practicalities, I've written about taking an iPad back to 1990 before. The novel is the version where the answer turns out to be a person.