ABSTRACT
Elise, like the majority of others today, gears her thoughts towards the future. Once, when her future vanished, she tried to kill herself. This chapter discusses how far a person looks into the future and how it is determined by the society in which they live. For a hunter gatherer, it was virtually impossible to plan more than a few weeks ahead because every day involved gathering and consuming food. It was only when people had crops to cultivate, a plan to follow, a common time to adhere to, that the future expanded to encompass an entire lifetime. It does, however, happen – even for Westerners – that people are sucked into a state of absolute presence. When Dostoyevsky was about to be executed, he experienced this as a living intensity so powerful that it erased the boundaries of his sense of self. This intensity is precisely what a future-oriented life is lacking. The claim made here is that technology and social institutions have broadened our perspective of the future, consequently enlarging the scope for envisaging how things might go wrong.
