The future looks bright.

Look at whatever is currently good in your life and try to trace it back.

A fair amount of it will turn out to be unplanned — a job that came through someone you barely knew, a friendship that began in a queue, a flat you took only because the first one fell through.

Forecasting runs on known quantities, which is exactly why it undershoots. The good things that have not been invented yet cannot appear on any list.

Brightness is less a prediction than an acknowledgement that the arriving things are not all accounted for.