Addiction to Prediction

The title of this piece spoke to me a few weeks ago: Addiction to Prediction.

That is how it feels these last few weeks have felt, trying to predict how this election will turn out. The reality is that if I just wait until the results are in, I will not need prediction at all.

Prediction is about knowing something ahead of time. Sometimes, we don’t know when we will learn something. But other times, we clearly know when the results will be in (beta results, college admissions, election tallies) or around the time the answer will be revealed, and we work hard, expending a lot of mental energy to know one day or a few hours earlier than expected.

Except we sort of only want to know good news early. Bad news, that can wait.

I recently read Liane Moriarty’s new book, Here One Moment, about a group of people who all receive the year and how they’ll die. On the one hand, if you know you’re going to drown, you can take steps to try not to drown for those 365 days, but most of the ways people were going to die weren’t avoidable. For people who heard they were going to die deep into their 90s, they felt a sense of peace. For those who heard they were going to die young, it weighed on them and impacted the present as they waited for the date.

But that’s the thing about prediction: If you’re working to find out something ahead of time, you’ll hear whether it’s good news or bad news, and you’ll have to live with that imperfect information longer.

Sigh.

I’m not sure we will watch the returns at all tonight. I may cave at the moment, though I’m saying that I won’t watch because it will only make me anxious. We’ll see what happens during the actual moment.