About 12 years ago, I started testing and writing about smart rings. They’re really tricky little things to build. Back then, the way they looked was pretty chunky and the way they worked was pretty clunky. But I was convinced they’d eventually become mainstream.
Plenty of people told me they wouldn’t. That they were too niche, too weird and too impractical. I distinctly remember someone in my industry telling me that focusing on them and writing about the complexities of their design was, apparently, a complete waste of time.
Today, millions of people wear smart rings. I sometimes wonder how many of the people who dismissed my interest in them are wearing one right now?
I’m not sharing all of this because I enjoy being right. In fact, for every tech trend I’ve spotted correctly, there have been many more that never materialised.
But what interests me isn’t really the prediction itself. It’s the strange psychological experience that sometimes accompanies it.
The mix of conviction and doubt, confidence and uncertainty, that can arise when you think you've spotted something before everyone else has. The loneliness of carrying a possibility that nobody else seems to share. And sometimes, the sadness of watching a future emerge that you wish wasn't coming.
And I suspect that if you’re someone who spends a lot of time paying attention to the world, you’ll recognise some version of that feeling.
Maybe it was a moment in your job where you noticed something early. Like a shift in your industry or a change in technology. An obvious political move. A crack appearing in a relationship. Or concerns about something larger, whether that’s the societal impact of AI or the slow-moving reality of climate change, long before they became part of the mainstream conversation.
Essentially, a pattern emerging that seemed obvious to you and invisible to everyone else. And then, you watched people dismiss it. Maybe they thought you were being dramatic or pessimistic or simply couldn’t see what you could see yet.
Whatever the specifics, there’s something intensely lonely about watching a pattern emerge before it becomes visible to everyone else.
I’ve been thinking about what that feeling does to us when you spend enough time paying attention to emerging patterns, shifts and possibilities. And I’ve realised that pattern recognition can be useful, but it can also drive you slightly mad.
You’re not the first person to feel this
The ancient Greeks had a story for this feeling, and it’s one I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s the story of Cassandra.
Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. She could see what was coming before anyone else could. But after rejecting him, she was cursed so that nobody would believe her warnings.
Which meant she spent her life watching dangers emerge, trying to convince people to pay attention and failing again and again.
Thousands of years later, we still remember this story because it speaks to something very human. And most of us have experienced some version of it.
Maybe not on the scale of fallen cities and curses, but in plenty of everyday ways. We’ve watched something unfold that felt predictable in hindsight. We’ve tried to warn someone about something they weren’t ready to hear.
The frustration of seeing something before other people. The helplessness of being unable to make them care. The loneliness of carrying a possibility that nobody else seems to share.
I find some solace in knowing this experience, this feeling, is shared and it’s ancient.
And maybe the story also reminds us that there is rarely a reward for being right. I think there’s a fantasy version of foresight where everyone eventually realises you were correct and you get to enjoy a moment of vindication. But reality tends to feel very different.
If you’ve genuinely seen something troubling coming, watching it happen is rarely enjoyable. There’s no vindication in seeing your fears confirmed.
Whether it’s a failing relationship, a mistake someone wasn’t ready to hear about or a much larger social or technological shift, the outcome is often the same. If the thing you were worried about actually happens, nobody really “wins”.
Don’t turn foresight into an identity
When I began writing this essay, I thought it was going to be about staying hopeful when you feel you’ve spotted something important and the world around you seems resistant to the idea. But I think the more useful lesson lies elsewhere.
For those of us who see ourselves as good at spotting patterns, the challenge isn’t only trusting our judgement. It’s making sure we’re seeing clearly.
Because it’s very easy to identify with Cassandra. Much harder to hold up a mirror and ask where our own ego, biases and blind spots might be distorting what we see.
Because, you see, when you’re good at recognising patterns, it becomes tempting to build an identity around it.
You start collecting evidence that you see things others don’t. The predictions that came true become easier to remember than the ones that didn’t. You begin to trust your instincts a little more, then a little more, then a little more.
And eventually, maybe without noticing, your curiosity starts sort of calcifying into certainty.
I think this is where foresight, or being wedded to the idea that you’re excellent at pattern recognition, becomes dangerous.
Because sometimes what we’re seeing really is a meaningful pattern or signal. And sometimes we’re just seeing anxiety or projecting our fears onto an uncertain future.
The problem is that both experiences can feel the same when you’re inside them.
We know that the human mind is incredibly good at constructing stories and then mistaking them for reality. As Daniel Kahneman spent much of his career demonstrating, confidence and accuracy are not the same thing. We often mistake the coherence of a story for evidence that it’s true.
That’s why I’ve always believed that the most important skill when we’re thinking about the future isn’t how accurately we can predict what’s going to happen, it’s how quickly we can course correct.
Researcher Philip Tetlock found something similar in his work studying the minds of “superforecasters”. The people most consistently good at anticipating change weren’t defined by certainty but by their willingness to revise their views when new evidence appeared.
The willingness to update your views, hold an idea without becoming attached to it and admit that even your strongest intuitions might be wrong.
Because the moment you become emotionally invested in being the person who sees the future first and always knows what’s coming, you actually stop seeing clearly.
Because now you’re no longer observing. Instead, you’re defending an identity. And identities are much harder to update than ideas.
Remember you have blind spots too
A useful thing to remember when you become convinced you've seen something others haven't is that people are rarely ignoring your warnings because they're stupid or malicious. Most of the time, they're looking at the same situation through a completely different lens.
We know that human beings are remarkably skilled at avoiding information that threatens the worlds they’ve built around themselves. And none of us are immune.
We avoid uncomfortable truths about our careers, our relationships, our habits, our health and our beliefs. And that isn’t because we’re irrational, but because uncertainty can be painful. Because changing your mind is difficult. Because acknowledging a problem often requires action, sacrifice or loss.
Psychologist Leon Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, which I’ve written about several times before but it’s always worth revisiting. It describes the discomfort we feel when new information threatens existing beliefs, identities or decisions. We often want to close that gap, remove that discomfort, more than we want the truth.
Once you understand that, collective denial doesn’t become any less frustrating, but it does become much easier to comprehend.
People aren’t always rejecting information because you’re wrong. But they aren’t always rejecting it because you’re right, either.
Often they’re protecting something else entirely. Whether that’s their worldview, their sense of stability or an identity they’ve spent years building.
And if we’re honest, there are probably areas of our own lives where we’re doing exactly the same thing.
The mistake is assuming you’re always Cassandra. Sometimes you’re the person trying to warn everyone else. Sometimes you’re the person dismissing her warning.
The difficult part is that it’s often impossible to know which role you’re occupying in the moment.
Keep paying attention
I wish I had a neat way of resolving this.
We live in a time that can make paying attention feel surprisingly difficult and often heartbreaking. Especially if you’re someone who feels deeply and spends a lot of time thinking about the future, noticing patterns and trying to make sense of what’s changing because you genuinely want the world to be a better place.
Sometimes it can feel like you’re seeing something important while everyone around you is looking the other way. Sometimes it can make you question your own judgement and even your sanity.
As I get older, I realise there are no prizes for being someone who feels so deeply they often feel cracked open. I think that often comes hand in hand with pattern recognition. With wanting to warn people about what’s coming. With wanting, ultimately, to help. It’s not an easy way to move through the world.
But what’s the alternative? To become closed off? To stop caring? That feels worse.
I think the challenge is to remain open despite all of it. And I’m not minimising how difficult that can be.
To resist hardening every observation into certainty. To resist assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is blind, foolish or acting in bad faith. To remember that there are almost certainly things you’re missing too. To acknowledge that it may feel profoundly lonely and yet you are almost certainly not alone in feeling this way.
Maybe I’m struggling to find a neat resolution because there simply isn’t one.
Maybe the work is simply to keep paying attention. To what’s changing, to how you’re interpreting it and to the moments when you might be mistaking a feeling for a fact.
To share what you see without needing immediate confirmation. To stay curious without becoming cynical. And to remain willing, even after all of that, to change your mind.
Everything you write makes me a little bit cleverer.