Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.  Nothing makes me a liar quite like the future.  Like, I remember when you joined Twitter in 2008.  I told you I will never join that website.  Nobody needs to know what I had for lunch, but then eventually, time proved me a liar.

Later, after I joined Twitter, I came to believe that everybody having access to megaphones and the free and open exchange of information would inevitably lead to a more just and equitable world, which proved a little naive.  

So, Hank, one of my many problems is that I always believe that present-me and future-me are the same person experiencing the same context, and so I'll make big declarative sentences about the future, as if I know anything about that future. 

Now, this is mostly a video about writing, but I'll give you one non-writing example of what I mean.  In the early 2000s when I was young and promising, my roommate brought home something called "wifi" and she was like, look, if you're within 50 feet of this box, you can get the internet!  And I was like, nope, I will never use that service.  It makes no dang sense because I already have a 100 foot ethernet cord.  And then the future went and made me a liar, as it always seems to.

But this is especially true when it comes to my writing, because I always believe that my current beliefs are incontrovertible and permanent.  So like, first off, I lie about what I'm going to write.  I remember before The Fault in our Stars came out, I said, with great confidence on this very YouTube channel that my next book would be about kids living on a desert island.  I did end up writing most of that book, but it had no guts in it, like, no reason for being, and so instead, I wrote a different book that became The Fault in our Stars.  Cue 1% of this video's viewers being like, Crash Course John Green is the same as Fault in our Stars John Green?  It's true.

Anyway, more recently I announced that I was done writing fiction, or at least a certain kind of fiction.  My two most recent books, The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything is Tuberculosis have been non-fiction and in general, quite different from the novels that came before them.  Like, both non-fiction books were published for adults, neither is really about romantic love or friendship or the other themes that obsessed me over five novels, although I guess they are about imagining other people complexly, which is my overarching theme, and I guess they do both have kids in it who like poetry, which is my other jam, but anyway, they're different from my previous books, and when I was in my 20s and 30s, I didn't even understand the point of writing non-fiction.  Like, I remember a friend of mine told me that he was going to abandon his fiction career for a career in journalism, and I was like, what a waste of talent, because at the time, I really believed that text-based fiction was the only way to create narratives that could transform the lives of readers, but of course, the future made me a liar.

But I wasn't done making life-long declarations, of course, because having started writing non-fiction, I thought I was done writing fiction.  As I discuss a little bit in The Anthropocene Reviewed, I just didn't understand the point of fiction anymore and it felt to me like my historical moment could only be met with the truth, and so I thought the permanent future of my writing was in non-fiction.  I missed writing fiction, but as I once put it, I missed it in the way you miss someone you used to love, but I should know by now that if I wait long enough, the future will eventually prove me a liar, because ever since I finished Everything is Tuberculosis, I've been writing fiction.  It may never come to anything, I've learned just enough to know that I should not promise that what I'm currently working on will eventually coalesce into a book, but it's been a thrilling process.  

What I love about writing fiction is the way you can escape yourself.  Like, when I'm writing non-fiction, I'm trying to articulate my own perspective on something, but when I'm writing fiction, I'm trying to escape my perspective and imagine the world through someone else's eyes, and that attempt to like, shrink the empathy gap through imagination turns out to be a worthwhile endeavor, even in the year of our lord 2025.

Now, of course, Hank, the solution here is that if the future is always making a liar out of me, I should stop trying to predict the future, but I can't.  You're quite a good future predictor.  Your books have already seen things coming that I never could have imagined, but I suck at it, so I should really just stop making predictions about what I want to do in the future creatively or otherwise, like, if you told me 10 years ago that I would write a book about tuberculosis, I would have said, "Is that still a thing?"  What do I know?   Maybe the stories I'm working on will become something, maybe they won't.  The privilege of my creative life these days is that I'm able to follow my creative interests where they take me, and the whole point of that is to go in unexpected and unexpectable directions.  That is the joy of creative work, that it retains the ability to surprise.  I need to hold on to that and celebrate that instead of constantly being made a liar by the future.

So, Hank, here's to the future being unknown and unknowable and having no confidence in any future predictions except for this one: Hank, I'll see you on Friday.