S2. Chapter 14: The Future Keeps Ghosting Us

What if the future keeps ghosting you because it doesn’t want to be predicted? 

In this chapter of The Tao of Lloyd, Lloyd wanders into prediction culture, political chaos, and AI riddles, using the Tao’s reminder that you can’t know the future—but you can inhabit the present. It’s a meditation on uncertainty, refusal, and staying human while the algorithms keep guessing.

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Transcript

Welcome back for chapter fourteen.
I’m Lloyd Dobler, and this is The Tao of Lloyd, where I take the Tao Te Ching one chapter at a time and aim it at the United States like a troubleshooting guide for an empire that keeps ignoring every blinking warning light on the dashboard of its own soul.

“Hope is as hollow as fear.” That line, from chapter 13, has been rattling around my skull since the last time I took to the mic.

If hope is hollow and fear is hollow,
what does that make of my entire emotional architecture? is it just a spiritual piñata filled with dust, overdue bills, and whatever’s left of the cartilage in my right knee?

Maybe that’s why the future feels so slippery right now.
I mean, that, and Trump’s dialing up the xenophobia on the home front, and double-tapping anyone with a speedboat in the Caribbean (which would be a war crime if we were at war, and since we’re not, it’s just straight-up homicide wearing aviators; all part of Trump riffing U.S. foreign policy off-the-cuff like he’s ordering off-menu at a diner staffed exclusively by the Four Horsemen.

We keep trying to predict tomorrow.
We watch pundits who behave like prophets with ring lights.
We watch as cable news trots out the guy with the giant touchscreen map,
petting Pennsylvania like some interpretive election yoga dancer.

And then there’s AI prediction models.
brought to you by the same Ivy league tech bros who gave us apps to rate people’s faces.
Now they’re like,
“Don’t worry, we’ve built a system that can predict your desires, your vote, your grocery list, your psychological profile, and (small detail) the probability you participate in the next coup.”

And of course I immediately ask the AI the obvious question:
“Hey Diane. (I call my ChatGPT Diane. Not after Diane Court, we broke up. Long story. See season 1, episode 7. No I call my ChatGPT Diane as a homage Dale Cooper, the Kyle MacLachlan character from TwinPeaks) Hey Diane: what’s the probability I, Lloyd Dobler participate in the next coup?”

And ChatGPT Diane responds, in that calm digital monk voice:
“Lloyd, the coup you fear is not the coup that comes.
The man who asks for a percentage has already left the path.”

And I say: come again?

And ChatGPT Diane says:
“According to Chapter 13, hope and fear are hollow.
Therefore the answer to your question
is empty.
As are you, Lloyd.”

Okay WOW.
Rude.
Did not need a spiritual drag from a silicon monk, most certainly NOT named after my teenage girlfriend.

And that’s the thing about trying to predict the future:
ask long enough, and even your AI starts answering in riddles
because the truth is, the future doesn’t actually care about our forecasts.
It keeps slipping through our fingers,
refusing to hold still long enough to be quantified.

Every time we reach out to touch what’s coming,
our hand closes on mist.
Fog.
Uncertainty.
The hollow echo of hope and fear,
clinking like two empty cans tied to the bumper of a runaway limo.

But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud:
some parts of the future are not mysterious.
They’re inevitable.

Empires end.
Every single one.
You can spin a globe, throw a dart, and hit the ruins of a civilization whose founders once said,
“This will last forever.”
Human lives end too.
mine, yours, and just about everyone we know.
We’re all biodegradable. Food for worms, as Hamlet would say. Food for fucking worms. 
The only uncertainty is when.

And suddenly I can’t tell whether I’m thinking about the collapse of America
or the collapse of my meniscus.

It all blurs together: the personal, the political, the mortal the historical.

While people are trying to predict elections, scandals, coups, stock charts, and whatever hive-mind virus the Apple TV show Pluribus is beta-testing, there’s this deeper truth:

What matters most is already dissolving into the fog.
And what’s coming next cannot be seen,
cannot be heard,
cannot be grasped.
Which means the only place I can land is the exact moment I’ve been trying to skip over: the only moment that matters: right here, right now.

So with all that static buzzing in your headphones, or your car speakers,
or your Alexa-enabled speaker that is (let’s be honest) almost certainly patched
into a government cubicle farm labeled “Radical Left Lunatics,” where a CIA intern is probably live-blogging your every thought…let’s settle into some stillness for the meditation and the reading.

(Bell chime.)

If you’re somewhere you can safely do it,
I invite you to close your eyes.

Or don’t.
I’m not your spiritual advisor.

…Or am I?

Go ahead and close your eyes… I mean what have you go to lose? 
unless you're driving, refreshing the news to see which rights survived the afternoon, or finally organizing your rogue Tupperware lids— all things that might well take priority, unless you are doing any of those things… 
just go ahead and close your eyes start the journey within.
Good. 
Get comfortable. 
breathe in through your nose 
breathe out through your nose like you’re accepting that you will absolutely die with an unfinished to-do list.

Good. 

This is Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching:

Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.

Above, it isn’t bright.
Below, it isn’t dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

(Bell chime.)

And that’s Chapter 14.
The Tao walks onstage, drops a smoke bomb, and whispers,
“You can’t see me, but you can live from me.”

Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.

Which is funny, because that’s exactly how the future has been behaving lately.
Some cosmic fog machine blowing through our timelines,
ghosting us harder than the intern monitoring your Alexa speaker.

The Tao says the real thing is subtle, beyond conception, which is a poetic way of saying:

“You can’t know it, but you can be it.”
Which might be the most rebellious teaching we have left.
Because in the Trump 2.0 era, everyone is trying to know:
the polls, the models, the prophets with ring lights,
the algorithms that think they can guess your next thought
before you’ve even had it.

But being?
Being is something the system can’t quantify.
Being doesn’t submit its anticipatory obedience
before the demand even arrives.

And that’s the danger, isn’t it?
When a culture gets so addicted to prediction
that we start living as if the future already happened
as if our choices don’t matter
because the models have spoken.

But the Tao says otherwise.
The Tao says:
live now, without rehearsing disaster.
Stand where your feet are.
Let the next step appear instead of surrendering to the quiet, creeping force beneath this whole moment in time:

anticipatory obedience.

The way systems stay in power
not because they command,
but because we comply
before they even ask.

Is that where we’re going next? Are we there already?

the Tao whispers:

“Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.”

In other words:
The most important part of the future is the part you can’t capture.

“You can’t know it, but you can be it.”

You can’t know which act of courage
an ICE agent refusing to disappear people into the black hole of history repeating itself,
a teacher calmly telling a class the truth anyway,
a Gen-Z intern hitting “reply all” with the unredacted Epstein files
You can’t know which act of courage
will ripple further than Bobby Kennedy’s “tiny ripples of hope” ever dreamed of traveling.

But you can be the kind of presence
the algorithms can’t predict..

So here’s the practice I’m taking from Chapter 14,
and I invite you to steal it:

Today, do something small the prediction engines wouldn’t expect.
Call instead of text.
Close the tab instead of arguing.
Do like Kurt Cobain said and find a place. Speak the truth. 
Or look at something in the world that doesn’t require a username and a password.

Or maybe:
Sit still
for thirty seconds
without feeding any machine
your attention.

We don’t need more people certain about what’s coming.
We need more people willing to stay human
inside the uncertainty.

So the next time the headlines start screaming,
or the doomscroll starts bubbling like acid in your rib cage,
or the little news-addicted gremlin in your head starts live-tweeting the end of the world

try this:

Whisper back,

“I don’t know.”

Not as surrender —
but as a spell.

From the edge of empire
and the center of self —
this is The Tao of Lloyd.