If you learn anything as a reporter, it’s to be wary of apocalyptic predictions.

I think journalists are pretty good at reporting what’s happening now, but they tend to lose their heads and perspective when it comes to preparing us for the future.

You might have noticed, as I have, we are prepared for very few of the really big things that happen to us, and that when there is trouble, there is a nation of academics, book writers, pundits, scientists and various “experts” lying in wait to get on TV and predict the end of something – like life as we know it.

In just the past few days, I’ve seen a score of interviews, articles, think tank gnomes predicting unimaginable change at every stage and level of life, even as the past few weeks have reminded us that the future always surprises us, it has never yet happened as we were told it would happen.

As a reporter, I learned that apocalyptic and alarming predictions and breathless warnings bring good ratings, good profits, much panic, book sales, and hand-wringing.

It seems to be human nature to anticipate the worst. Nobody would bother to watch TV if they said everything was fine.

Most of the time, nobody pays any attention to these breathless prophets and gurus. When there is a great tragedy, they come rushing out of the darkness like bats awakened in caves.

Some of them make good sense, but you may notice that the best scientists are very careful not to tell us they know the future.

Nobody predicted Mr. Trump would be president, many people predicted at least two million Americans could die at the hands of Pandemic. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said a hundred times that nobody predicted what would happen accurately because nobody knew what would happen.

Remember all the hysteria about China? New Yorkers got the virus from Europeans, says the governors. Nobody knew, nobody could have known.

We were all walking in the dark.

I read just yesterday that most colleges would go out of business, restaurants as we know them would vanish, cities would empty out, nobody would go to work in offices again, movie theaters would close, Broadway and all theater would disappear, cities would be abandoned in droves and go bankrupt,  we’d never see our doctors again,  schools would go virtual, and we would be wearing masks for the rest of our lives.

I don’t believe most of those things will happen, at least not for forever.

The coronavirus was serious enough, it doesn’t need to be dramatized and made into a Dystopian nightmare. Sometime within the next year or so, somebody will produce and market a vaccine, and while a lot of things will change, a lot of things will stay the same.

Once people are no longer frightened of getting sick, they will quickly return to normal life.

In fact, much of life will return to normal.  We will love the things we have always loved, and do the things we have always done. With some important new twists.

What makes more sense to me is that the Pandemic will accelerate a lot of changes in business and retailing and health care that were already in great flux.

Young people will want to go to college and be with other young people away from their parents so they can have sex, have fun, and prepare for the adult world. Colleges will still be ready to take their money.

Does anybody think all those gorgeous dorms at Yale and Harvard and thousand other schools will just be torn down and abandoned because mostly old people and poor people are sick? This is America.

Yes, malls are in trouble, they have been in trouble for years. And marketers know that demise of big, brick-and-mortar department stores has been coming for years and will pave the way for countless new, creative, and idiosyncratic businesses we haven’t even dreamed of.

They had decades to change, few of them did.

Online shopping is the future for many products and has been for some years. The Pandemic has sped that along, for sure Amazon, Target,  Google, Apple, and Walmart can’t count the money fast enough. Amazon is hiring 250,000 new workers.

The Pandemic has been good to them.

People will want to go out to eat because take-out and always eating and cooking at home is boring. Most people will still want to go to offices to know their bosses and co-workers and get out of their homes and into the world, meet clients and associates, see different things.

Kids will go back to school because they will want to, and more importantly because their parents will insist on it. So will the teachers’ unions and desperate mothers, who have been pressed back into double duty as workers and housewives.

For all the chatter about the virtual classroom, I  haven’t heard a word about who will be taking care of all of those kids while they are at home? Nobody will, they will be back in school, as they have been for centuries. A teacher/friend told me that one benefit will be that sick children can still go on Zoom and get their lessons.

“But otherwise,” she said, “it will be pretty much the same once a vaccine comes.”

Video conferencing makes sense for some doctors in some situations. But not in all situations. Seeing people in person is also considered essential for practicing good and intuitive medicine.

Nobody wants to live their lives in a room looking at iPhone photos or Zoom screams. You can’t heal wounds or do surgery or tell brutal truths on cellphones.

Humans have never wanted to live in that way.

Even the happiest couples I know would go bonkers at the thought of never leaving their homes spouses seven days a week.  I would and I love my wife dearly.

Most suburbs and heartland towns are just not as interesting as cities,  don’t offer much to do, have little good health care or shopping, that’s why people fled them in the first place.

There is perhaps some truth to all of these hyper-ventilated predictions.

But perspective is critical in situations like this, and media is a double-edged sword. It will inform you and drive you mad at the same time. Politicians are generally useless when it comes to the future. It is not something (unlike fund-raising) that they need to know.

I’d remember this:

Nobody ever got on TV predicting that everything will be the same.

No cable news channel ever made money by denying the imminent collapse of our democracy or of Western Civilization.

No politician ever gained votes by saying nothing needed to be done urgently.

Our culture is Dystopian by nature and culture, it is not known for being calm, reassuring, or even remotely accurate.

Not a single national journalist predicted the rise of Donald Trump. And here they all are four years later, unabashed or humbled, and assuring us every single thing in our lives will change.

I’ll be honest. I have no idea what the future will be like, I would bet a lot on the notion that our lives will change a lot less than we are being told it will change.

My own experiences tell me this – that everything will change is not true, or even remotely true. The fact that it is perhaps true to some degree true in some instances is not especially dramatic or transformative. Dystopia makes for better novels and movies than predictions.

If you live in rural America right now,  or in many cities, you just learned once again to be careful of predictions. Experts sometimes have to spout worst-case scenarios just to get people’s attention away from their cellphones and Facebook scribblings.

They probably saved a lot of lives that way, by warning of the worst and preparing for it. I don’t begrudge them that.  But enough is enough. The future will take care of itself, it doesn’t need us to try and foresee it at the moment..

I believe the governors did the right thing by shutting us down, they had no real idea what was happening either. But it’s worth remembering that almost nothing that happened as a result of the coronavirus was what we were told was going to happen.

I see no reason why the future will be much different. In a year or two, I believe me and my wife and daughter and granddaughter will be living in and looking at a world that will be quite recognizable to us.

I read in the Kabbalah recently that God told one of the angels that when he finally gets sick and tired of humans and decides to bring life on the earth to an and,  there will be no wise men around to predict it.

Nobody, he said,  will see it coming.