My friend Matthew watched the music video for my song Hindsight and offered feedback on the imagery, the words, the overall feel. Then at the end, he asked something I hadn’t considered: “Will there now be a foresight?”
How I Learned the Word “Hindsight”
I came to “hindsight” through confusion. The first time I heard “hindsight is always 20/20,” I didn’t know what the expression meant. Someone had to explain it to me. Even then, the word took time to settle into something I truly understood.
Once it did, I did what I tend to do with words that catch my attention: I turned it over, thought about it from different angles, felt its shape. Eventually, it became a song. The central idea in that song is a challenge to the cliché: hindsight is not always 20/20. Looking back doesn’t guarantee you’ll see clearly. The invisible gorilla experiment illustrates this well — in some versions, you aren’t asked to spot the gorilla at all. You’re asked to look for something else, something that was always visible. And you still miss it. We see what we’re primed to look for, even when looking back.
Three Words, One Root
Matthew’s question about foresight sent my mind somewhere it hadn’t been.
Hindsight: looking back. Past.
Foresight: looking forward. Future.
Then it settled: insight is present.
Right now. In this moment. I can see it.
I had been thinking about time perspective (since reading the book The Time Paradox): how our orientation toward the past, present, and future shapes how we experience and process the world. The three -sight words fell right into place. Hindsight, insight, foresight. Each one rooted in sight. Each one pointing to a different position on the timeline.
The image that works for me is driving. The present is what’s happening right now, in this lane, in this car. The rearview mirror shows what I’ve left behind. Looking through the windshield is foresight, reading the road ahead based on patterns I’ve recognized. And when I glance into that rearview mirror searching for something specific and actually find it, that becomes an insight about the past, not just a replay of it.
What Gets Lost in Translation
Once this clicked, I wanted to explain it in Brazilian Portuguese.
I couldn’t, not with the same clarity.
In English, the three words share a root. The visual metaphor holds together because the language holds it together. The Brazilian Portuguese equivalents don’t share that structure, so the mental image breaks apart. The thread of sight that runs through hindsight, insight, and foresight simply disappears in translation.
I don’t have a resolution yet. It’s something I want to keep exploring — which images or metaphors might carry the same weight in Portuguese, given that the linguistic scaffolding looks different there. But the gap is real: how much of what we can think clearly depends on the language we’re thinking in.
The Data Spiral
At any given moment, there’s far more available to observe than we’re actually tracking. Driving down a street, I might note the cars around me, their positions and speeds. But I’m not tracking the trees, the wind, how a passing vehicle disturbs nearby leaves. That selective attention is normal. Until it creates a blind spot.
If I were building a realistic driving simulation and everything looked right except the trees, I’d realize: I never gathered that data. The present insight reveals a past gap. And that shapes what I start tracking going forward.
That’s the spiral. Hindsight shows what I missed. Insight names the gap right now. Foresight decides what to collect differently.
The clearer I can see across that whole arc, the better the questions I can ask: about what I’m looking at right now, and about what I might still be missing.
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