Do We Think Too Much About the Future?
“For most of history, people didn’t try predicting it. Maybe that was wise.”
One feature of life story psychology is the concept of life review, a tendency to think about the future in terms of what our lives mean and what we want to leave as a legacy.
In this New Yorker article Joshua Rothman looks at what had to happen over the centuries “for the idea of the future to make sense.” Today, he continues, “the future is deeply woven into the practical fabric of our lives. It’s almost as though we live there.”
And about this present sense of the future, he says:
Two facts stand out. First, since no one actually knows the future, guessing, speculating, or simply making things up remains the state of the art for almost everyone involved in describing it. . . . And second, our views of the future tend to be dark, and seem to be getting darker. Young people, in particular, increasingly report that they’ve “lost the future” as something to look forward to; they feel trapped in a world careening out of control.
7 Books That Use Family Archives to Break Generational Silence
A collection of documents that lead to an examination of a person’s family history often creates poignant written stories, either fictional or nonfictional. Tamiko Nimura, of Japanese-American descent, undertook this process in writing her memoir, A Place for What We Lose.
Here she offers a list of books in which “authors unearth and incorporate family archives in creative, innovative, poetic, and genre-bending ways. By sharing their personal inheritances, they prevent history from becoming a faded-sepia matter of the past.”
The Trouble With Narrative History
“To understand human history, we must resist attributing meaning and motive to it.”
Not everyone believes in or accepts the concept of life story psychology as a means of creating self-identity. In this article, adapted from his book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, Alex Rosenberg illustrates his point about stories by contrasting the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Adolf Hitler:
One is the work of a great writer reflecting decades of careful research, a factual chronicle of profound moral force. The other is the illogical, disconnected scribbling of a madman, a disorganized screed of hateful fiction masquerading as history and implicated in the death of millions. But both changed the world in profound ways because their readers held each work to be true.
Alienated from My Languages
“Reflecting on the failures of multiple languages amid regimes of repression and war.”
poupeh missaghi is an assistant professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver, and a faculty mentor at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon. Her “mother tongue” is Persian, and her “second language” is English. She calls herself “a translator between English and Persian and a writer who primarily writes and publishes in English.”
The current war between the United States and Iran has alienated her from both languages:
English is now the language of the aggressors, as well as the false messages of liberation they leave for Iranians. It is the language of the man who said he might bomb the island of Kharg, one of the most important oil resources of the country, “just for fun.” It is the language other Western governments use to demand Iran stop retaliating . . . . And yet, Persian, too, has begun to feel unsafe. It is the language used to promote this war over loudspeakers and in the news media throughout a severely polarized diaspora. The language in which some in Iran speak of the war as salvation, arguing that the regime forces are worse.
Lucy Sante Recommends Five Books About Her Most Important Tool as a Writer: Memory
“Memory is my most important tool as a writer,” Lucy Sante says. Memory is also a key element in life-story psychology, because we are what we remember. Here Sante, recipient of many writing awards and recently retired after 24 years teaching at Bard College, recommends several books about memory and how it works.
Mom and Dad Were Radicals. In Two Books, Their Children Write to Understand.
“Zayd Ayers Dohrn and Harriet Clark on activism, violence, guilt and trying to make sense of their ‘incomprehensible’ early days.”
This article from The New York Times discusses two recent books written by children, now in their late 40s, of women associated with a 1960s militant group, the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground.
Like all children, their stories began at home.
I Cloned Myself With Gemini’s AI Avatar Tool. The Result Was Unnervingly Me
Yeah, this truly is creepy. What’s even creepier is the realization that what used to seem like a good science fiction trope is now a common, everyday occurrence.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
