{"slug": "fear-of-the-future", "title": "Fear of the future", "summary": "Making decisions based on fear of the future leads to self-destruction and a bleaker outcome, moving individuals away from their true selves. It contends that the past, not the future, defines who we are and should guide our choices. The author emphasizes that prioritizing a hypothetical future self over one's past self results in betrayal and unfulfillment.", "body_md": "Everything we do to secure ourselves, every decision we make out of fear of the future, ends up destroying us, ends up making our future a little more bleak — the closer we are to the public ideal of “success”, the farther we go from our own private, ideal, from our soul, if you want… Because ultimately it is not the future, but our past that defines us. The past determines who we are and it is the past that we should think about when making decisions, not the future. “What would my position be tomorrow?” is unimportant. But “How would I feel about myself tomorrow?” is the real question. And you won’t feel good, if you are betraying your past self, for the welfare of a future self, which will never materialize, which remains only a vain hope, that gets more and more disconnected from reality.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fear-of-the-future", "canonical_source": "http://abuseofnotation.github.io/future-self/", "published_at": "2025-12-24 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-22 11:41:30.331998+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": [], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fear-of-the-future", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fear-of-the-future.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fear-of-the-future.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fear-of-the-future.jsonld"}}