A few weeks ago on the subway, I saw an ad announcing that a certain cryptocurrency was on a “future-proof blockchain.” Future-proof, in the terminology of the crypto world, is a claim that this particular blockchain is flexible enough to adapt to broader technological evolutions. But this was an ad. It appealed, presumably, to people who don’t know about cryptocurrency or the blockchain but are drawn in by the sense that they, too, would like to be protected from the future.

And with good reason. Each winter that’s warmer than the last brings the dread that next winter might be even worse, that the freak storms might now be a normal part of our lives, that whatever we decide today might be undone tomorrow by a flash flood or a fire. For many of us under the age of forty-five, the idea of long-term stability seems like a fantasy. What little ability we might have had to plan our lives over decades evaporated with the start of the pandemic, when the living of life became, at best, a day-by-day affair. Even the Left, which puts the promise of a better world tomorrow at the center of the work we do today, feels adrift.

But even as we fear it, we rely on the future’s promise, on the way that the mere possibility of the existence of a time different from right now takes the pressure off today. Then, because we’ve deposited all our hopes in it, all of what today could not and would not be, we fear that that future might never actually arrive. We are scared of the future in the same way that we are scared of the dark: for its ability to ruin us with what we, even if we might have imagined it, cannot see coming. In the meantime, we are left with today — ugly, uneven, unfinished today.