What about tomorrow? (04.11.2025)

What about tomorrow?

The other day, I was chatting to a close friend of mine. She is positive, brave, resourceful and upbeat even though her life has been challenging. Yet, for the first time, she admitted to being fearful. More than that, she said she had been living with this fear for the last ten years.

No-one is immune from anxiety about future; in fact, I am feeling rather anxious myself about what is going to happen next. This has got me thinking about the problem. Why do we worry about the future, and how can we overcome it? 

There is both a psychological answer and a philosophical answer, and I shall leave the psychologists to unpack the issue from their perspective. Instead, I want to explore it philosophically because at the heart of the question is an intellectual challenge.

Every day we draw conclusions about our world based on the observations we make. These conclusions aren’t certain in the way 2 + 3 = 5 is certain (doubting the answer means you can’t add up!), but they are often reasonable. Take tomorrow morning; it is reasonable to assume the sun will rise because it has risen every day of your life so far. In other words, your conclusion is based on repeated experiences. You can apply this to everything in your life. You assume your house will still there when you return from work; you assume you won’t get run over because you know how to a cross a road safely. I can go on and on.

But is it rational to base your expectations about the future on your past experiences? You might argue that you haven’t got an option (how else are you meant to do it?) but that doesn’t mean your expectations are justified. At best, they are hopes, fears, anticipations, beliefs or just habits of thought. In other words, your confidence (or fear) is a matter of psychological expectation, not logical proof.

And, by the way, this has profound implications for science. Science relies on repeated observation and experimentation, yet it cannot fully escape the uncertainty inherent in its methodology. Every scientific law is, in principle, open to revision should new evidence arise.

Philosophy calls this dilemma ‘the problem of induction’ and it feeds into our fear about the future in two ways.

You might have made some poor decisions in the past and fear that you will do so in the future.  Working on the expectation that the future will resemble the past, you may be crippled by anxiety. Am I going to mess it up? Perhaps, people have told you time and again that you’re prone to getting it wrong. Yet there is no reason to believe this is a true prediction. Your next decision might be excellent. It might ‘break the pattern’. It is reasonable then to proceed with cautious optimism.

Or you might face a different problem. Since you can’t be certain that the future will resemble the past, your plans and preparations are always subject to doubt. You have to confront the possibility that unexpected events may disrupt your life, and this too is crippling because you can’t foresee what you cannot know.

In other words, both scenarios result in hesitation and a reluctance to take risks. People end up living with an existential fear of what comes next.

Our inability to know the future can be paralyzing; but it can also be motivating. If we accept what philosophy tells us, we can make headway in overcoming our anxiety. We can accept that uncertainty is an inescapable part of life and make peace with that. We can remind ourselves that our fears are often projections and say more about our emotional state than the state of the universe – and yes, we might need a counsellor to help us unpack our beliefs and trace their origins.

But we can also ensure our plans are based on educated guesses (and not emotions) and build adaptability into them so we can better respond to unforeseen events. We might also work to update our beliefs about things based on new evidence.

Or we might embrace a belief system to help us cope. Religion offers God as a caring force who will always be there no matter what. Stoicism encourages us to accept uncertainty, while existentialism encourages us to embrace it and take risks because we can never know what will happen next.

Whichever path you choose, it is important to realise that uncertainty about the future is not only a philosophical ‘fact’ but also a path to personal growth; it doesn’t need to be the cause of a crippling anxiety.