When In Doubt, Make It Up

How can one predict the future?  Traditionally predicting the future seemed to involve killing something and examining the entrails.  This begs the question that if entrails are so good at predicting the future why didn't they warn the animal in question to stay away from the nutcase with the knife.  Others place their faith in spirit guides, as if the dead don't have anything better to do.  The spirit world must be pretty dull if the denizens have nothing else they'd rather be doing than providing advice for a bunch of lack witted, superstitious idiots.  I hope I don't wind up there when I die.  Although it must be admitted that the opportunities for a little malicious fun seem almost limitless.  But back to predicting the future, I personally can read palms, which is to say I was taught how to do it by someone who believed in that stuff.  I mention this occasionally, generally in the middle of some rant about the stupidity of fortune telling, and immediately find myself surrounded by people eagerly demanding that I tell their future.  If people insist on being that stupid it seems almost wrong not to charge them money for it.

Of course there is another form of fortune telling.  It consists of examining the likely consequences of possible actions and the likely responses of people to those actions.  This is colloquially known as using your common sense and despite the name it isn't very common.  I rather suspect that most people who go to a fortune teller already have a pretty good idea of what their future holds.  They don't go to the fortune teller to hear the future, they go there to hear something different.  I, for instance, have a reasonable idea of what my future holds and there is no way I would pay good money to hear something that boring and depressing recited back to me.  A lottery win and an affair with Scarlet Johansson would be the least I would expect.

So, how does one predict the future?  We can disembowel every animal on the planet without coming any nearer the truth and if the inhabitants of the spirit world are anything like me you would be insane to place any faith in them (although if you place faith in them you probably are insane).  Even the common sense option doesn't work as often as you might think due to the intervention of coincidence, chaos and the inherent refusal of most humans to do anything even remotely sensible.  So what to do?  Watch television is my answer although in deference to our new cyber age possibly I should extend that to communications media in general.  Watch them and try to pick out the hidden trends.  This will enable you to make educated guesses.  As an example; in Australia at the moment every second television advertisement is for life insurance.  Life insurance works on premiums being paid during the course of ones life in return for a lump payment on death.  Consider it saving for a rainy funeral.  Suddenly every financial institution in the country is hawking life insurance.  What does this tell us?  It tells me that it is increasingly likely that we're all going to live forever.  Good thing it wasn't an uneducated guess really.