I Told You So

The Bible is filled with prophets. Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekial, the 12 minor prophets. You can’t throw a rock without hitting one.

Attending religious school, I devoted a small but memorable chunk of my childhood to reading and discussing the antics of these prophets. Today the stories blend together in my mind: God not happy, God sends vision of future to prophet, vision is filled with doom and gloom, prophet warns populace, populace scorns prophet, prophet gets angry, maybe a little hysterical, populace concludes prophet is a nut job who should be institutionalized for his own safety, prophet ends up telling populace to go to hell for all he cares and retires to a timeshare in Eilat. Or something like that.

I thought it would be pretty cool to be a prophet back then, even with the poor career prospects. If the populace wouldn’t listen to me, I’d place a few strategic bets in the futures market, maybe go long sackcloth and ashes, and then sit back and wait for the death, doom and destruction to hit and the populace to finally start repenting. I’d make a killing. Enough to buy me that timeshare in Eilat.

I also dreamed of being a modern day prophet. Being poor, I was obsessed with money, so I thought once I got some really juicy stuff from on high I could make this prophet thing pay off if I played the stock market just right. Establish some strategic long and short positions before disclosing my message. That way when I hit the talk shows to warn of impending doom, I’d be set. If people listened to me, they’d drive the value of my positions up. Immediate profits. If they didn’t listen to me, I’d still make out pretty well, but I’d have to wait for the pestilence or plague or whatever to hit before my positions paid off. And it might be harder to close out my positions with darkness at noon, locusts swarming the land and the temple curtain split in two. People might get distracted, stop trading, I’d be doomed to spend eternity waiting for an uptick.

I guess that’s my incentive to work extra hard to get my message across quickly and effectively. The Profitable Prophet, that’s what they’d call me. Or at least that’s the branding tag my PR people would plant in the media. And people would be more likely to buy my message if I’d already put my mammon where my mouth is. Money may be our golden calf, but it certainly packs them in.

Now that I’m older, though, I no longer dream of being a prophet.

I now realize that the minute I cashed out my prescient positions in the stock market, the SEC would be all over me like their cheap suits. They’d assume I’d stolen inside information. I’d explain that I’m a prophet, so I came by my inside information honestly, the old fashioned Biblical way. “It’s been prophesied,” I’d say. I’m no prophet, but I can foresee how successful that defense would be.

Bad enough as spending my days in leg irons and an orange jumpsuit would be, I now appreciate that the field of prophetry has an even more significant drawback for me: I don’t have the personality for it.

I’ve learned this the hard way, by developing a little sideline in prophecy at the office. I’m a very minor prophet, nothing on the scale of a Jeremiah or a Jeane Dixon, but in recent years while dealing with problems at work I’ve been visited by unsettling visions of the future. I can see exactly where this is going, I think, and sure enough that’s where it goes. A project goes south. Saw it coming. A business partner screws us over. Saw it coming. A colleague is revealed to be a lying sack of shit. Smelled it coming.

The first time this happens, you think you’re lucky. The second time, you think you’re smart. The tenth time you start thinking you’ve been working here way too long. By the fiftieth time, you’re making notes for your chapter in the New New Testament.

I call these my “I told you so” moments, but don’t get the idea that I take any pleasure in telling you so because I don’t. It’s a real pain. If I see a train wreck coming, I feel compelled to warn someone. Especially when I’m on the train. But this is not easy to do. No one likes bad news. They prefer the sunny side, resist the darkness. Glass half full, not half empty. Shoot the messenger. So they resist warnings, embrace wishful thinking and set their minds to work on believing only what they want to believe.

Interestingly, people are most likely to resist a warning when they themselves are most likely to benefit from it. They might be willing to entertain the notion that the train could crash, but only if they’re not on the train.

I’ve also noticed that most reactions follow the same progression, from disbelief to denial to bargaining to anger. Sort of like the seven stages of grief, except for some reason I’m the one who usually ends up with the guilt and depression. Seeing the future makes me feel responsible for it. If they don’t listen to me, if they snicker and call me a Chicken Little as the train derails, I blame myself for the wreck. Even if I had nothing to do with it, other than foreseeing it. I worry that I should’ve made my case more effectively, I should’ve been less strident, or I should’ve been more strident. Then they’d have listened to me and the crisis would’ve been averted. And all along I feel bad for them, those cows striding so confidently to their slaughter.

The worst are those slow motion train wrecks, the ones that develop slowly but inexorably over months or even years, the ones where everyone’s stopped listening to me ages ago and all I can do is try to avert my eyes as the horrors unfold in all their sickeningly predictable detail.

This is why I’m not suited to the prophecy business. A normal healthy prophet does his best to deliver his warning. If the people don’t listen, he shrugs his shoulders and thinks “I did the best I could,” and moves on with his life. He doesn’t worry that he could’ve or would’ve or should’ve delivered his message differently, and he certainly never blames himself for the tragedies visited on the heedless, having developed a psychologically healthy distance between himself and the victims.

Another type of prophet actually enjoys saying “I told you so.” They live for those moments of superiority, and for that they’re rightly reviled. I am not one of these people. I avoid prophecies. Too much trouble. When a prophecy is thrust upon me, I try to deliver an effective warning so we never get to the “I told you so” moment. I get those involved to believe the warning was their idea all along, for nothing else is as effective in penetrating our defenses against bad news than to think we thought of it first. In doing this, I cede my moment of superiority, but that’s a good trade if I can cede the guilt as well.

Dealing with this is exhausting, all the torment, turmoil and time. I want it to stop. But how? My prophecies are almost entirely work-related, so I’ve been avoiding people at work, keeping my office door closed, declining lunch invitations, arriving late to meetings so as to miss the problem-of-the-day chit chat. I’m slowly disappearing, but it’s not enough. Problems continue to find me, and, when problems knock, prophecies follow.

So I need a more permanent solution to my problem. My sense is that ignorance is bliss here; I don’t prophesy what I don’t know. But how to achieve ignorance? I can’t just switch my brain off, the damn thing never stops. And I’m not willing to inflict brain damage on myself, whether through mind-altering substances or a drill bit through the temple. So I think the only solution is to find a new job, preferably one I know nothing about. Back at the bottom of the learning curve, scrambling to orient myself and learn the basics, just trying to make it through the day, I’ll lose the ability to see around corners. I will once again view the world with wonder, my days filled with surprises.

Will this really happen? Right now the Magic 8 Ball in my head says: “Better not tell you now.” I’ll shake it again tomorrow.