In capturing a source of our existential anxiety, Kierkegaard’s famous quip “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” highlights something fundamental about our epistemic situation: we can understand events only in hindsight.
That, in and of itself, is not a problem. What makes it problematic is that we grant unwarranted value to our keen aptitude for making sense of things after the fact. Our ability to build a reverse-engineered causal chain, to construct a coherent narrative in the past tense, to cast a tightly woven retrospective net across experience, engenders a false sense of confidence in our ability to apprehend the world as it truly is.
In addition, the most potent events in our lives are invariably those which are entirely unpredictable ahead of time, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Black Swan events,” events that have an extremely low probability but an extremely high impact, events that are impossible to anticipate or prepare for ahead of time but entirely explainable—understandable—after the fact. Even the most unprecedented events seem somehow mundane in retrospect. Every event of importance, in our personal lives and in the world at large, has a Black Swan quality to it. Every single one.
This should terrify us. But it doesn’t. False confidence gleaned through the lucidity of hindsight prevents us from perceiving the precariousness of our situation. We are walking backwards toward the edge of a cliff, a canyon carved out of otherwise flat terrain. We see the path that we have traveled receding into the past, with all of its previously unforeseen obstacles clearly visible, all once-hidden dangers obvious and discernable, all unexpected twists and turns clearly marked. And when we step off the edge and crash down to the canyon floor, hindsight will be our guide.
