Believing in history is easy enough—we have little choice, as it turns out, because regardless of what you care to think, history is believing in you. But suggesting the possibility of belief in the future seems to be a major revelation for some. As if I told you that yesterday happened. It is big business for some, to assure others that the future will happen. There are profitable Churches of the Fact of the Future, whose only function is to verify the existence of the cosmology of history in general. Their scam is encouraging you to believe that knowledge of history in general is enough to let you know your own personal future. But specific questions of a personal future are not the real issue here.

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The question to ask of the future is not what, but why? The future, as I have seen it, is the future. There were new technologies, new triumphs, new tragedies. There were new occurrences of the continued existence of humanity in the future, with all the suffering and bleeding and spitting and gushing and moaning in pleasure and pain. All the time and thought given up to reassuring ourselves that we are experiencing something, and that we will likely go on to experience something different. All of that navigating, to assure ourselves that we are standing where we stand. But to ask why, would take up all those precious resources with a much more difficult question. Why was the future the way it was? How did the future get so fucked up, and despite the fact that we could remember that the future would be the way it was, we still watched it occur with barely a shake of our heads? We know the facts of history, and yet we seem to merely remark upon them. We spend so much time confirming the obvious fact, we barely pause to think why.

The answer isn’t a simple existential theory. If only it were as simple as mere eschatological motive or rationale. If only the sidewalk and the roadway were a grand plan. Shoes and cars would be angels. But there’s no skill required here. There is little talent to learn. I remember the future of driving and walking, and it is very much like walking and driving in a car. There is always more street, and all the street is now connected. The future is visible in these streets, and it looks like streets, full of dust, blown up to obscure where street signs might exist

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