Needs a Title!

At every point in time in history, humans have only ever lived in the present. No matter what you try to do, you can only live in the present, the now, never the past and never the future. But to anyone, living in the past is a mentality, the wish for a time that has gone by, yet the future is an unknown, and an inevitability. We are told to never live in the past, to stay focused on the present and look to the future. But the problem lies in the fact that the future is something that has yet to happen so how do we look to the future?

You cannot build a time machine and attempt to see what the future has in store for you, maybe in the far-off future they might, but that is for the future to know. We, as people living in the present, cannot know for certain what the future will hold, no matter what we do. You can prepare what the future may have for you by what you do currently, but it is not set in stone, nor is what you do accurate for what will come.

Murdering someone has a very high chance of you getting arrested and being put into prison for much of your life, but that doesn’t mean it is a certainty that it will happen. You might just get away with it, nobody knowing the truth and you going on with life.

Uncertainty will always be present in the future; it is something that can never be removed. As humans, you often see that future without that uncertainty, you believe in the certainty that the present gives, and transfer that to the events that have yet to occur. You see yourself in a world with infinite choices, yet you do not see the path these choices will take you.

The Ancient Egyptian’s wrote the hieroglyphs in the “God’s Language” to preserve their rituals and history in stone, with monuments built to them and their pharaohs. Not for a moment in their lives did they believe that in the future, people wouldn’t be able to translate these hieroglyphs, that their language would be lost to time. Yet if this is the case, how did we translate the hieroglyphs? The Rosetta stone.

The Rosetta stone was discovered by pure chance, and only written due to some unknown figure that decided to write the decree in literal stone. Maybe he thought that more people could read it, considering it is in three languages, and that in the future people may want to know what that decree was.

The future is something that cannot be accurately predicted but can be prepared for.

To modern humanity, when looking at the hieroglyphs, we see an owl, a foot, literal pair of squiggly lines. But to those ancient people, that was written language. A concrete fact, something literally etched in stone to represent their history. But the times change.

Professor Jamie Hodgkins from the University of Colorado excellently describes this, “People give symbols meaning, and as cultures change, so do the representations of that culture.” As those who understand something change, the way it is understood also changes.

Language itself is something that will change, it is a certain that it will. Hieroglyphs have been abandoned for other forms of written communication, meaning that the words and references understood at the time of writing were lost.

English seems like a concrete concept to modernity, a language spoken throughout the world with billions of speakers. Yet a thousand years ago English practically completely unintelligible compared to it is now. The entire language was shifted, rearranged and tweaked to fit the French speaking conquerors. An unpredictable event that most likely was never considered to those speaking English prior.

To us, the swastika is a symbol of Naziism, the holocaust, genocide even. Yet to those who lived in the world before Hitler’s rise to power, the swastika represented well-being, even luck. But the actions of those who use that symbol in ways opposite to its meaning change the way that the symbol is perceived.

If you bring a scholar from the past and show them what we have now, they would either be blown away by the amount of information we have, or completely confused on why certain things happen, or exist. You can easily get across the idea of gravity, that things fall to the ground, no matter who you are talking to, you could drop a rock as proof. But you can’t explain the concept of rocket science to someone from before the premodern era.

How do you get across an idea to someone who doesn’t know the idea or the process in which you reach that idea? You use concrete facts, evidence. But what would happen if these known facts, this concrete evidence, is somehow lost, or misunderstood? What would happen if our core idea about something changes?

We’ve already seen this happen, and it can easily occur. A skull and crossbones could mean pirates, but it could also mean death. To those sailors in the 17th century, seeing a skull and crossbones would cause fear, but now it could illicit joy. It might even have some consider it to be treasure, because as many believe, pirates bury their treasure. So now instead of fear being related to the skull and crossbones, they correlate treasure to it, even if the meaning is not treasure, and is supposed to be fear.

To prepare for the future is to prepare for something that can never be known yet is something that we always know is coming and will arrive whether we are prepared for it or not. It is imperative we prepare so that the modern day will not leave behind a legacy of danger and destruction. The future is the reflection of the actions we take, and we must prepare for a future where we are misunderstood, misinterpreted, yet the core ideas are preserved.

References:

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/symbols-shifting-culture/

From Old to New: How the English Language Evolved Throughout History