Ask a Sociologist: Why we can't predict shit

My new feature where people ask me random questions and I attempt to answer them

A few weeks ago on a lark, I asked for questions from folks for a new feature, Ask a Sociologist. Go figure, some people asked some questions. If you have your own burning questions, ask them in the comments.

Here’s my first answer. This question is from the lovely

Sandra de Helen

who writes Sandra de Helen’s Finding Joy.

Sandra: I have a question for you: what are the benefits of living to 100? I'm 8/10th of the way there, and wondering what I have to look forward to.

Well, first off, Sandra, congrats on making it 8/10 (or 4/5…the math nerd in me could not resist reducing that fraction) of the way to 100! What an amazing benchmark!

What do you have to look forward to in the next twenty years? What do any of us have to look forward to in the next twenty years? That is the question, isn’t it?

Let me admit here at the beginning that if you’re asking me to make predictions about the world based on my sociological expertise, well, sociologists truly suck at that. Pick a big historical event that’s happened over the last one hundred years and I can guarantee you that no sociologist or social scientist successfully predicted it. The whole global wave of social movements that happened in the 1960s? The Black Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the gay rights movement, anti-colonial movements…sociologists did not see that coming. Totally blindsided and then scrambling to explain what the hell was going on.¹

This inability to make predictions is deeply disappointing to many people, including my father. He’s a big fan of Isaac Asmiov’s Foundation series and if you’ve read those books, you’ll know all about psychohistory. Psychohistorians can crunch all kinds of data and then use it to make predictions about the future that are both very accurate and very specific.

“Why can’t you do that?” my father has asked me more than once.

“Because humans are too damn complicated,” I try to explain to him. “And, you know, unpredictable.”

Seriously, the social sciences aren’t very good at predictions. Or making actual discoveries. Or building theories. A sort of famous sociologist², Erving Goffman once said, “I’ve heard it said that we should be glad to trade what we’ve so far produced for a few really good conceptual distinctions and a cold beer.” In other words, we’re no psychohistorians. Sorry, Dad.

I don’t know, is Erving Goffman hot in s sort of sociologist way?

This is all a long way of saying, I have no idea what the next twenty years will bring on a global or even national level. I’m an optimist, so I believe they’ll get better…eventually. I believe humans have great potential to be good. I believe you see this every day on a micro level. We stop at stop lights. We move out of each other’s way on the sidewalks. When there’s someone sitting by themselves at a table, we ask if we can take the extra chair first before just grabbing it.³ We talk about the weather with strangers. In places like Asheville and the rest of western North Carolina, we distribute information and water and food and do whatever else we can to help each other out.

If you look close enough, goodness really is everywhere. It takes a lot to suppress that goodness and we’re doing an impressive job at squashing our goodness down to the bare bones right now. But it still slips through. That gives me hope.

Now, what do you personally have to look forward to for the next twenty years, Sandra? I don’t know you well enough to get into specifics, but I listened to a podcast the other day where physician Atul Gawande talked about the importance of knowing what one good day looks like and I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

I’ve been thinking about this when I get bogged down in idiotic questions like, “What is the point of all this?” Or, you know, that Peggy Lee song gets in my head…Is this all there is? What am I doing here at fifty? What are you doing at eighty, Sandra?

Here’s one answer I’ve been throwing around lately—I’m here to string together one good day after the other. That’s it. It’s that simple. And that complicated. Because to string together all those good days, I have to figure out what a good day is for me. Do I have to write for it to be a good day? Am I writing because it brings me actual pleasure or because I have some sense that it’s what I should be doing?

I think in a good day, there aren’t a lot of ‘should’s.’ I think part of getting older—maybe the best part of getting older—is letting go of all the ‘should.’ I think it’s drilling down to a deep knowledge of what feels good. Sitting in the sunshine. Reading a book. Watching birds. Whatever it is that makes your toes curl or your shoulders relax or curls your lips into the beginnings of a satisfied smile.

That’s what I hope you have to look forward to over the next twenty years, Sandra. I hope it’s what all of us have to look forward to. More good days, whatever that looks like for you.

1. Spoiler—a big part of the answer to that question is demographics. Demographics are the very boring statistics that describe a population. For example, the age breakdown in a given society or country. Demographics should have allowed those sociologists in the 60s to predict all those social movements. A society in which you have a lot of young people (like huge cohort of the Baby Boomers) is going to bring some chaos because young people are chaotic. I mean, they have less to lose so they’re more likely to do things like sticking daisies in the end of assault rifles or trying to levitate the Pentagon building or using copious amounts of drugs.

2. Possibly this inability to make any predictions or discoveries is why there are no famous sociologists.

3. This happened the other day while I was sitting in the window of our local coffee shop. A woman just grabbed the chair from a table where a man was sitting and I happened to know that he did, in fact, have someone with him who was inside getting their coffee. But the woman just grabbed the chair without asking first and I was HORRIFIED. It was HORRIFYING. So rude. Probably tourists in town for Chautauqua. But the point is, this was HORRIFYING because it is the exception and not the rule.