There’s something that the philosopher Heraclitus said way back in ancient Greece that I think of lately. Those words are, ”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

In essence, it means we are in a continual state of becoming. The only consistency about us is our consistency in changing based on our life experiences and traumas and revelations and moods. The more I think about it lately, the more I realize that — perhaps — we push back against change too much to live comfortably. 

In our society, external pressures create a tension to perceive change as bad or stressful, while internal ones push us to seek it out as part of our nature.

For instance, I’m a millennial. You have no idea how many times in my life I’ve heard “it’s just a fad” or “people will get sick of it” concerning nearly every technological advancement that has happened in my lifetime. When the internet and the online world clicked on in a big way back in the 1990s, the inventor of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, predicted that the internet “will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman predicted that the internet’s economic impact would be “no greater than the fax machine’s”. And even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, so no point in making internet-connectivity and an online presence a priority. 

Yet, here we are. The majority of people either shop for or purchase things online, and our phones are the equivalent of pocket-sized computers connected to wi-fi. The internet has blown well past 1996, and Microsoft probably should have jumped on board sooner — a mistake they’d, unfortunately, repeat with the Zune in the 2000s. 

However, we can do something worse, in my opinion, than fighting against and putting down new things and opportunities. We can completely ignore the fact that, even though the same type of situation may find us, the outcome could always be different. This applies whether we make the same or a different choice, because everything around us has changed as well. The same choice that failed in the past could work now, and vice versa.

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The past is not a loop we keep repeating in the present and future. That remains true even if the negative parts of life can make us feel that it is sometimes.

The truth is, human beings are consistently horrible predictors of the future. Confirmation bias, overconfidence bias and emotional blind spots we may have at any given point in our lives coat all of our predictions. All of those will skew any estimated guess away from being realistic. However, your actions will still follow that perceived, unrealistic future you’ve let take root in your own mind — both expecting and creating that outcome. 

In this way, we are incapable of being objective enough to see the future fairly. However, this ability to shape the future in our minds is a useful tool if used in a productive manner.

Historian Frank Bouman van Veen somewhat hit on this sentiment during a TedxTalk in Harderwijk , Netherlands in October 2024. In fact, his entire speech was about explaining why human beings are so terrible at predicting the future. Near the end, he considered a quote of Winston Churchill.

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” Churchill is attributed as saying.

Bouman van Veen used this idea as a call to action for his audience.

“In order for the future to be kind to us,” he told the crowd, “we have to start writing it and stop assuming it’ll happen on its own.

“The question is, will we be slaves to the historical cycle of repetition, unable to look past our own habits and prejudice wondering ‘what if’ until the end of our lives? Or will we realize our direct influence upon the future today, prioritize what is truly important and break the cycle?” 

You may find yourself back in the same spot or a similar place to other time periods in your life. Hell, right now I feel like I’m back in the same spot for the third time in 10 years. Trust me, I know that the repetition of it can be overwhelming and crushing. 

However, remember, it’s not really the same spot. 

And you’re not really the same person who stood in it before. 

Things can be different as long as you let them be something different — not something you’re trying to “catch in the act” of being like something from your past. 

You can write your own future, if you want. 

You just have to let go of what you think your past says it should be.