If you only speak and act from what you already know, you’ll only recreate the past. This is a key insight in many spiritual traditions. The only thing that can transcend the prison of a predetermined future is natural and spontaneous action in the present, in the moment, Taoism’s wu wei, which arises from the vivid recognition that only the living present is actually real. Such action is a glitch in the matrix.

This principle scales across and translates to every area of life.

In a profoundly insightful essay in her excellent Museguided newsletter, Tamara reflects on the way our addictive imprisonment in the past, with the accompanying re-creation of its dismal troubles, is a meta-theme wrapping its tentacles around pretty much everything these days:

We misread the past to predict the future. Mistake after mistake, like toddlers with tarot cards, we flip history’s pages hoping patterns will behave, forgetting that hindsight is a seductive liar, always neat, always linear. But history isn’t a manual. History is a murmur, full of contradictions we compress into palatable parables. We call them “lessons”, but really they are just flattering myths about how much control we think we have…

The Enlightenment gave us this dangerous idea that knowledge would save us, that the more we knew about the past, the more prepared we’d be for the future. This is charming. Like saying the more intimately you understand your last heartbreak, the less likely you’ll fall for a new kind of liar. Except, of course, you don’t fall for the same mistake twice… you evolve! You fall for a higher-resolution version of it. “We learn from history”, we say, while rebuilding Babel in silicone and giving it Wi-Fi. We don’t learn. We stylise our delusions with data sets.

—Tamara, “The Past Lies, the Future Laughs,” Museguided, January 7, 2026

She briefly traces the principle across political ideologies, the rise and fall of civilizations, the development of new technologies, the experiential arc of personal relationships, and more.

Echoing the same theme in a different register, Dan Blank observes this principle playing out in our full-immersion engagement with digital media and their predictive algorithms:

What I found with scrolling on Netflix, Prime Video, Max, and so many other streaming services is the same list of curated films being presented back to me again and again. They make their archives much more difficult to access than you would think. And the entire time, when you glance at a movie, previews begin playing. No wonder my 15yo now listens to music on vinyl records. You can justify that he is a digital native, but even he has had enough of the endless scroll.

—Dan Blank, “The Year of Analog (not AI),” The Creative Shift, January 9, 2026

Dan says this is leading him to pursue a less digital and more analog life with his family in 2026—something he notes is an apparent emerging motive with many other people, too.

In Writing at the Wellspring, I talk about the importance of living and writing “into the dark” by recognizing that there’s actually no outline, no predetermined plan in the reality of this moment. We’re always taking just one step at a time on a road where that’s the only step we can see. The past is nothing but memory. The future is nothing but projection and anticipation. Both are purely mental, and therefore both are only real as thoughts. Reality in itself is right now, unfolding in real time.

This means all bets are off. It’s either terrifying or exhilarating.

Actually, it’s both at once. To live in that liminal zone of terror and exhilaration is to base your life in the only place and state where the truly new can emerge, where you won’t be doomed to recreate the burdens you already know.

Even more actually: It’s always already this way. Recreating the past is an illusion. Suffering under its burdens is an illusion. Everything is always new and unprecedented. We’re always living into the dark. We just imagine otherwise, and forget we imagined it, and mistake it for real.