what's going to happen now?

the unvarnished truth

Look if you want you can turn on eight different news feeds and read acres of commentary and analysis, consult the oracle Heather Cox Richardson, then cross check her take with your hairdresser’s and a canny magpie on the highest branch of an ancient oak. But you’re here now and time is of the essence, so allow me to lay it on you: Because I know what’s going to happen now. I do.

My sterling qualification as a futurist is that I got six and a half hours of sleep last night and have unloaded and and loaded the dishwasher twice since waking up this morning and turning on the news. I had to figure it out, not because I’m economist or a cult leader (though I’d obviously be awesome at both) but because I live alone in a house with two children who occasionally, in times of great turmoil, look at me stricken and ask, ‘What will happen now?’

I’m a skint single mother, not a Vanity Fair columnist, which means I really can’t afford to be wrong.

In the recent past, when the boys have asked me this question about other troubling matters, I’ve panicked and said unhelpful stuff like: ‘Worst case scenario? We might lose the house,’ or ‘Maybe we’ll move Singapore, the state schools are meant to be good,’ or ‘Everything will be fine,’ or worst of all options: ‘Sorry guys, I honestly don’t know.’

But I had to stop saying all of these things. Not because they were lies — strictly speaking they weren’t — or even because they were wrong (which they are). But because I wasn’t answering the question in question, by which I mean the question they’d posed.

‘What’s going to happen now?’ is a simple, direct question. It deserves a correct answer.

And what’s more, I did know. I knew precisely what the answer was when I tell you, you’ll realise that on some level you know it too. So I began telling my sons the truth and almost immediately we all felt better. And now I’m going to share it with you.

But wait! Before I do, allow me to also give you some advice for maintaining your sanity as you read the unfolding commentary over the next couple of days. Try to remember that if the question is, ‘What’s going to happen now?’ a half-baked solution to catastrophic imagined scenario is not an answer but a deflection. Try to weed out the genuine insights from the projections of panic because panic is a virus that breeds.

I don’t pretend to be sure about much but one thing I know is that adults (like children) often behave as if we know everything including what’s going to happen when in concrete material terms, we know shockingly little, and this is especially true of American election results. Our perceptions are increasingly skewed and distorted, and the major driving torque factor of cognitive bias is unfounded terror. So if you want to see the world clearly, my firm guiding principle is that the more more savvy and assured someone seems in their viewpoint, the less you should probably trust what they say. Check your privilege and your facts, do it constantly. Full stop. I tell my kids this too, but for some reason they’d still rather watch some guy blathering away about video games on YouTube than a classic film.

Humans are great at inventions but we’re crap at predictions, even when we have a fifty-fifty chance of being right, we usually get it wrong. We let our feelings guide us because that is our nature. We invent stories and systems of order to contain them then throw up our hands when they create more problems in turn.

And the funny thing is, deep down we do know what’s going to happen in long run if we keep going the way we’re going in the short run — because it’s simple straight maths — but the short run is so interesting and complicated we forget the obvious and whiz round in circles deluding ourselves. A harsh lesson, endlessly demonstrated by history but never quite learned. And now we have learned it again. Except we haven’t because… wait, what was I saying again? Oops.

So this morning, when my sons looked at me stricken and said, ‘What’s going to happen now'?’ Here’s what I said: