Past vs Future

There's a photograph I have of me at school in 1993.  I only recognise a handful of the kids in the photograph, the rest changed classes over the years or I have completely forgotten who they are.  When I look at the photograph however, I don't just see the kids in it, I see what they grew up to become, and in one or two instances that wasn't anything good.  Of the kids in the photograph there is one in particular I know of who went on to commit murder and he went to jail for it.  Looking at the photograph however there's no indication of any of that, what he did or what anyone else did.

We can know our past, sometimes not in its entirety but we know most of what happened to us.  We can know our present, again, sometimes not in its entirety as there can be things that we are blind to even now.  When it comes to our futures, we can't know for certain what they will hold, not for us nor for anyone else.  There are very few things in life we know are certain and most of them are pretty grim.  There always comes a question when you speak of the past, of what you would have done had you known then what you know now.  The difficult part of that question comes from whether or not we believe we can alter the future.

There's a tweet I saw long ago saying how everyone thinks if they went back in time they would be paranoid about changing the present by doing something small like stepping on a bug, and yet we don't worry about the future here in our present, we don't think about massive changes in our future happening because of small actions we make here in the moment.  To believe that you could not change history no matter what you did if you went back in time, is to believe that your future cannot be changed no matter what you do.  There's a greater will to believe this is true of the past and present than there is of the present and the future.  The question is why?

Perhaps the question simply comes down to probability.  We don't believe the possibility for us to go back in time is ever likely to happen and so because the circumstances are improbable we are much more willing to accept them as fixed.  Whereas the flip-side is the present day, where the probability that you would be able to change the future seems a certainty to us, because we can take any action we want here in the moment and that will have an effect on our future.  We know we can change the present for certain so we refuse to accept the future as something certain.  Yet the real question isn't one being asked in the moment but one being asked in hindsight, in other words it is a question that can only be answered in the future, not here and now.

Consider if you will, a person who approaches you today, and claims to be your future self.  Would you heed any warning they gave you?  Assuming you could verify it is indeed them, and they do indeed have knowledge of future events.  Would you actually listen?  Consider the thing you want more than anything right now, whatever gives you the greatest pleasure and joy in your life, would you give it up if they told you that you should?