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Comment by undershirt | Hacker News Reader

“the future according to the past” as my writing teacher called it quite pithily

the bigger mistake, isn't the future according to the past but the future according to the present, which is on the cusp of becoming the past.

It is almost impossible to see the now, we are too close to focus. My favorite in tech is that someone is porting from a legacy system. No that isn't how it works, you port from a legacy system to a future-legacy system. Be timeless and love your future self.

that’s profound. we should have drinks.

your comment resonates with the thesis that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our transcendence, and the world.

I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time, timeless.

In the zeitgeist of HN, The Fence [1] and that everyone was doing the best they could at the time, we need to have empathy both for the past and for the future. That is why we strive to make things better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

chesterton’s fence is great. I’ve recently appreciated the synthesis of the conservative and progressive impulses—to respect what has come before as it encodes unseen wisdom, but to recognize that there are fundamentally new things happening that we must account for.

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