predictions are silly when in a liminal state

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“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

H. G. Wells

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“You know, sometimes in life you can get kinda stuck and you feel like you should have changed chapters by now, but you can’t.”

Wish I Was Here <Aidan>

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“Liminal” means “relating to a transitional stage” or “occupying a position at both sides of a boundary.”

I have written that predictions are shit, today I outline why, pragmatically, they are silly if not a little dangerous. In particular, silly at this moment in time because I believe we, as in the world, society and social identities, are in a liminal space. I actually believe we have been in a global liminal space for quite some time. We’ve simply ignored it by skating on the superficial surface of events in specific topics to hold onto like straws in a torrential storm. We’ve been in a funk for awhile, education is in a funk, society is in a funk, politics is in a funk, business is in a funk, and when the pandemic occurred while far too many people pointed to that as the reason for all our funk we could no longer just be in that funk we had to begin addressing some of the core systemic things that were creating the funk that we had long been ignoring. Just like the tectonic plates underneath the Earth’s surface things have been shifting and the only people who’ve truly been paying attention are the people who pay attention to tectonic plates and the people who had to bear the brunt of the earthquakes, specifically in their location. The pandemic simply brought the inner Earth’s movements to the surface. We treated the pandemic like the big change event when it really just forced the existing transition faster than people would have naturally been forced to do. Yes. That funk was simply the fact we are in a global liminal space. We are traveling from the past to the future and the present is simply a fog. Within that fog some people are holding on to the past, some have crafted a dangerous alternative universe, some people are blindly searching their way to the future and a good number of people are seeking to solidly build the structure and architecture that can accommodate whatever future arises out of the fog. I stated it that way to suggest once again making a prediction when you are in the midst of the fog is silly.

Which leads me to liminal spaces are real spaces.

• Liminal spaces are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

Which leads me to say I am discussing liminal spaces as intangible mental spaces and do so in a larger societal context.

If you feel that you are anxiously floating in the inbetween perhaps you are in The Liminal Space. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word limens, which means, “threshold.” “… it is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else.

Societally, I believe we are living in an in-between; a space in which we have lost context and our brains love context <and hate lack of context>. This ‘hate’ translates into discomfort, maybe some anxiety and absolutely an innate mental desire to get the hell out of that space and into some space where we can reengage some context. Rationally we know these spaces are, well, irrational in that we recognize they are transitional in nature, and we can mentally stifle the anxiety – for a while. Because no matter how good we are at stifling it there will always be an underlying sense of uneasiness. I would add, counter to our desire for some solid context, liminal spaces are time resistant. What I mean by that is while people want to put some simplistic time codes on liminal transitions, well, liminality is quantum in time terms. Which leads me to say today’s world is basically various realities fighting for universality within the same time space.

Yeah. I am suggesting multiple realities are playing out in real time. So great transition the truth is that it Is multiple transitions occurring on different time continuum. This increases anxiety and uneasiness because, well, everything is connected with everything. Manufacturing is in transition. Resource sourcing is in transition. Supply chains are in transition. AI is in transition. Energy is in transition. Basically, everything that provides the architecture for how humans live is in transition. This also means human minds and mindsets are in transition. This makes us feel uncomfortable.  But my real point is this liminality isn’t some ‘three month’ or any finite time-limited thing. Liminality will define itself albeit nudged by humans interacting and making choices. For example, many of us – myself included – argued the inflation issues were transitory. The problem was that everyday people thought of transitory in finite terms – 3 months, 6 months, etc. -, but that’s not liminality nor is transitional. We meant transitional as, well, however long the variables within that liminal time and space had to play out. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that inflation is simply a mesa aspect with in a larger meta liminal civilization space and time and predictions tend to thrive on mesa aspects.

This is where predictions come in: ‘stuckness resolution.’

Predictions want to ‘unstuck us’ from this in-between and point us to where the liminal space will “be.” That’s nuts. Sure. Liminality has exacerbated our sense of ‘stuckedness,’ but stuck is not always stuck stuck, just tucked in between things. I would argue that this sense seems heightened these days because we are not in some polycrisis, not within ‘the great resignation,’ not even ‘the great reset’, we are in the midst of a great transition. And that transition, this huge liminal space, makes us feel stuck. This version of stuckedness means we never attain resolution on things. Circling back to ‘multiple realities in flux’ thought, everything IS shifting so there cannot, pragmatically, be resolution – in the moment. This creates an uneasy tension between the past, present and future. Maybe said another way, we are stuck in a continuum of unresolved things, therefore, predictions simply become the things we hold on to when we feel our unresolved world tilt.

Which leads me to in a world where we are simultaneously bombarded with a great deal of stimulation, we learn to focus our attention on what we believe are the important stimuli while filtering out that which we deem less relevant stimuli. This is a brain survival technique to reserve, and preserve, our focus resources, which are actually fairly finite, to apply against all the stimuli that need processing. Predictions become a panacea. We approximate shit seeking to get out of the in-between, embrace some prediction, only to find nothing truly gets completely resolved and, well, get angry and want to blame someone.

“Man is a rationalizing animal not a rational one.”

Robert Heinlein

Which leads me to winners and losers.

When you are stuck somewhere in-between identifying real winners and losers is difficult – this includes ideas. What I mean by difficult is that with a daily onslaught of new data, a sane human will settle on some vanity metric to point to; often to support the ‘prediction of choice.’ I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that success always rests on a fairly fragile balance between the needs of the individual and those of the collective and it would behoove us to understand that balance does not naturally occur in a liminal space – it needs to be monitored, calibrated, recalibrated in an exhausting minute-by-minute basis, human by human. If you don’t embrace this exhausting effort, power moves to anyone who has the most attractive prediction. That said. The problem is that we are now at a moment where the social contract is being renegotiated, involuntarily, because while we are stuck somewhere in-between, some dubious predictionists are crafting ‘the social contract,’ prediction by prediction, which will replace the one we know and like. I imagine my point here is if you are stuck somewhere in-between your ability to picture what the future may, or should, look like is impaired and your worldview can be manipulated if you embrace a prediction while in a liminal state.

Regardless. We feel uncomfortable because we are mentally in some transition space from which we cannot envision a tangible future. we are in a space with a weird combination of tangible and intangible and shitload of unknown. It feels tangible as in you walk in some blank-ish vanilla type space and actually exit by some door which appears at some point. But the blank-ish room is truly 100% intangible which creates a sense of instability and warped perception space. I imagine a lot of people flail about a bit in this space trying to not only find context or something tangible to hold onto, but also a frickin’ door to get out of this wretched liminal space, uhm, like a prediction. My larger point is that liminal spaces not only feel wrong, but feel like something is going to go wrong. You cannot really put your finger on it <although most of us try desperately to try to put a finger on something> and it increases anxiety. Sometimes that anxiety is high and sometimes it is just a bothersome niggling in the head, but anxiety is our constant companion within transitional eras.

Going back to the multiple realities unfolding and quantum realities, the anxiety occurs because reality is not really being altered, but it appears slightly warped. It is kind of like looking through an imperfect piece of glass – where things can look a little fuzzy or odd. It’s kind of like time has warped a little and you are coming and going at the exact same time where in the blur of the transition your brain is suggesting “this is not good … this is not normal” and you desperately want to move on to a future non-liminal space. Predictions are like water to people dying of thirst.

Which leads me to embracing being part of a transitional generation.

Oddly I will use Lenin to make a point. In 1917 he suggested capitalists would inevitably exploit resources of material and cheap labor in a desperate attempt to placate workers by raising their living standards, but that was ultimately self-defeating. And while Lenin thought this would speed world revolution it doesn’t really, all it does is constantly force people to feel like they are a ‘transitional generation’ (every generation feels this way) juggling obligations of the past and of the future – anxious about what they will have to sacrifice, to gain. It is self-defeating because within this is the thought is that it feels like a never-ending process instead of attainment of a specific progress objective. This leads people to never feel free to be able to focus on one thing and creates a sense that no situation can ever be resolved because we cannot give it the proper attention. This is what it feels like when multiple realities are reshaping themselves – asymmetrically. Effective transitioning, of whole societies, is complex. It demands renegotiating reality as the context changes. New negotiations with a never-ending array of issues depending on the context in the importance. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out it is impossible to effectively predict anything within a transition of overlapping cycles of collapse and creation, of revolution and evolution, of movement and progress.

Which leads me to say liminal spaces are throughways to places of the imagination – architectures of “what will be.”

That’s ‘future’ and ‘hope of something better’ type stuff. This isn’t the kind of stuff that gives any tangible context, but it does give us some fortitude to get through this space. As Dick Hebdige suggested it’s about creating bridges and orchestrating transitions. Creating and imagining another way of moving forward. Pushing for something that doesn’t yet exist and if people identify with that, then you shift things. It is a transactional space where transitions occur transaction by transaction, conversation by conversation. So, yes, a liminal space suggests we should be discussing transactions and not predictions. I imagine my point here is that the world itself, technology, politicians, businesses, seem to have a tendency to create a context within which you have to make an extreme effort to craft meaningful resolutions and that begets a desire for predictions. Maybe we should ignore that desire and embrace ‘transactional imagination’ and begin crafting the realities, and reality, we desire.

You can’t see forward, you can’t look back

There’s nothing that you need, nothing that you lack

And it ain’t gonna last this way

Sunshine/World Party

Which leads me to the thought that society seems to constantly encourage us to dream, but then shift those dreams to certainty under the belief in doing so dreams can be ‘attained.’

The truth is future times of either utopian or dystopian scenarios may never come to be. No one can make a sure prediction. One cannot say; and shouldn’t say, because the tragedy and magnificence of humans resides in the fact, as a species, we refuse to listen to reason. I begin there because it seems like we should be encouraging people to not only embrace the liminality between dreams and certainty (possibilities and pragmatism), but we should also be teaching people, in an increasingly uncertain world, the principles necessary to navigate the unpredictability of that uncertain world, i.e., teach how to navigate the wretched hollow of somewhere in-between. It is with that liminal navigation where we find the pragmatic stepping stones to maybe not get certainty, but enough certainly to make progress against our dreams (possibilities). Currently it seems like we either gladly embrace a system that doesn’t really encourage deep deliberation or we are just lost in the non-resolution of somewhere in between. I imagine part of what I am suggesting is that somewhere in-between fucks with our dreams and our response to that is to attempt to make the dreams concrete, i.e., embrace silly predictions. For some reason I tend to think this devalues the real value of dreaming, but that’s me. While we appear to invest a shitload of energy thinking through the seemingly infinite dimensions of societal foibles and technological hijinks, it can actually be quite freeing to simply admit they are unreformable and irredeemable and the only thing that will get is out of somewhere in-between, and find meaningful resolution, is humans, human imagination, and human dreams – none of which are conducive to predictions. Ponder.