At some point in every career, someone asks you to predict the future. Not literally. Nobody hands you a crystal ball in a meeting. But the question shows up in disguise, over and over: what’s going to happen to this role, this industry, this skill you’ve spent a decade building. And underneath the question is a hope.
If you could just get the prediction right, the fear would go away.
It won’t.
After twenty-five years, I’ve seen developers ask about outsourcing. They also wonder about the cloud and no-code platforms. Each new trend brings fears that their jobs might disappear. A different decade brings the same question and hope: if I knew what was coming, I could stop my fear now.
That hope is a category error. Knowing the outcome in advance was never going to tell you what to do today. It only felt like it would.
Epictetus spoke about this clearly, avoiding the usual comforting quotes people share. He talked about how Romans practiced divination. It was common. You would visit a diviner, pay for a reading, and receive answers about how your plans might turn out. Epictetus didn’t tell his students to stop going. He told them to notice what the diviner could and couldn’t actually give them.
The diviner can tell you the event. He cannot tell you whether the event is good or bad for you, because that was never his to know. It was already decided, before you walked in, by what kind of decision you were prepared to make in response. If duty calls you to stand by a friend in danger, Epictetus says, and the reading comes back unlucky, you go anyway. The forecast doesn’t change the action. It was never going to.
That’s the part people skip when they reach for prediction as a cure for anxiety. They imagine that if they could just see far enough ahead, they’d know what to do. But you already know what to do, or you know how to find out, using the same judgment you’d use whether the news is good or bad. Seeing the future in advance doesn’t hand you that judgment. It just moves the moment you’d need it. You’d still have to decide how to respond, on the other side of knowing, with the same self you have right now.
I think this is worth saying plainly for people in this field specifically, because our industry has a forecasting habit baked into it. We’re trained to estimate, to plan sprints, to model out what a system will need in six months. That instinct is useful for software. It’s close to useless for a career, because a career isn’t a system you’re designing from a spec. Nobody hands you the requirements in advance. You find out what the requirements were by living through them, the same way everyone before you did.
So what do you actually do instead of forecasting.
You do what Epictetus emphasized: decide ahead of time how you will respond, no matter the outcome. Not the outcome itself. The response. That’s the only part that was ever available to you before the fact, and it’s the only part that was ever going to matter.
This means the questions we should focus on aren’t “What’s going to happen to this skill?” or “Will this role still exist?” Those questions have no answer you can act on today, and chasing one is just anxiety wearing a research hat. The questions to consider are: If my fear happened tomorrow, what would the best version of me do next? Would I know how to learn. Would I know how to start over on something smaller than my ego wants. Would I still recognize good work when I did it, even without the title that used to certify it for me.
Answer those, and you’ve done the only preparation that was ever real. You haven’t reduced the uncertainty by one percent. You’ve made yourself into someone who doesn’t need it reduced.
This isn’t resignation. People often hear “stop trying to predict the future” and think it means being passive. They believe it’s about just waiting for things to happen. It’s the opposite. Forecasting is actually the passive move, dressed up as diligence. You’re outsourcing your peace of mind to information you don’t have and can’t get. Deciding your response in advance is active. It’s the only thing in this whole equation that was ever yours to build.
I’ve watched this play out both ways across a career, in myself and in people I’ve worked with. Developers who focused on guessing future technologies often struggled when changes hit. The ones who did best were those who quietly developed the ability to be useful, no matter the direction. That capacity didn’t come from a correct guess. They decided ahead of time what kind of worker and person they would be, no matter what the news was.
You don’t need to see it coming. You need to already know who you’ll be when it arrives. Those are different problems, and only one of them was ever solvable.
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