The future is scary. It has no definitive reply to questions posed to or about it; it only gives hints, and even then they are not reliable. It is unpredictable, representing the best and worst of humanity.
The present, however, is dismal. It's arduous, it's repetitive, it's just not a challenge. There is nothing to analyse in the present. Today, the present is all of the aforementioned qualities hundredfold. The economic climate over the past five years has been terrible. The past, often seen as a beacon for better days, will skip over this period with haste, or will exploit it with distaste, depending on its use. 'This is what happened,' they will say, 'when we all have too much of a good thing.'
It's why I look, today, at the future. Have a look at this article. Actually don't, look, rather, at the headline. If the economists are right, I feel now is the right time to be optimistic. Even the figures, constantly churned out to justify the pragmatism of today's government, point to the possibility of economic stability eventually. Ray Kurzweil, a man of exceptional genius, in 1999 said that by 2019, all students will have access to computers, that the shape and power of the computer will change beyond all recognition, and recently, that our generation will be one of universal abundance. And what is more astounding is that we're getting there, bit by bit, without the slightest notice from Joe Bloggs.
And I think that when I leave university in 2015-16, the world will have changed, not just that there will be an iPhone 6 or 7, or that televisions become even thinner and wider, but that the economic circumstances will have changed also. We will have new governments, new business opportunities somewhere, whether it be in London, Berlin or San José. Europe will be cleaning up from the meltdown, with or without the Euro. In brief, the economy will grow and back on its feet. It is our generation that must remain so - our parents are merely auxiliary.
Negativity will only reinforce negativity. If we believed The Sun and the Daily Mail, the UK is in a state of anarchy, where the only state of happiness is in owning identical three-bedroom semis in suburbia, with two children, with cream leather sofas in the sitting room. And how miserable does that sound? The 1980s were a similar period - a long recession, the threat of a superpower on Europe's doorstep, the ideal of a property-owning society, but boy weren't the 1980s a decade for Francis Bacon, for art, for theatre, for music, as culture bubbled under the floorboards of the middle class ready for a giant explosion into the 1990s? And it can be done again. Let us make the 2020s the roaring twenties of the 21st century.
'Be realists, imagine the impossible,' said the posters at the Sorbonne in May 1968, and let that message ring across the world.
