How to plan when life is up in the air

There are still practical ways to think about the future

In general, the near future will be broadly similar to the present. If I averaged 7.4 hours of sleep per night in 2024, it’s reasonable to think that I will be awake for approximately 16.6 hours per day in 2025. Most likely my family will be living in the same place and I’ll be working on roughly the same projects.

That said, the future is never certain, and in certain stretches of life the uncertainty feels more pronounced. For instance, my oldest child is figuring out where he’ll be going to college next year. It would be hard for him to make many concrete plans for next year without knowing where he’ll be living, or which college schedule he’ll be working from, or anything like that. I know that when people are looking for new jobs, or navigating a complicated diagnosis, or perhaps trying to grow their families, all these things can make looking too far forward feel fraught. Maybe there will be a new baby in a year or maybe there won’t be. How can you plan when those are so vastly different scenarios?

But even if life isn’t knowable, time doesn’t stop moving. It would be a shame to write off bigger chunks of time as completely unusable. Here are some strategies for thinking about the future when it feels less secure.