No Future Without the Past
It sounds like something your friend might whisper at four in the morning after enjoying some of the Devils lettuce, but it’s true, there is no future without the past. The places we’ve come from, the traditions we’ve inherited, the choices we’ve made, all of them shape the limits and possibilities of who we can become. Sometimes that’s a comforting thought. Other times, it feels suffocating. Because to move into our future means admitting it’s built on everything that came before. We can’t escape the past. But we can learn to carry it differently.
We tend to imagine the future as a clean break. The new job, the new city, the new person we’ll finally become once we “move on.” But if you’ve ever found yourself stuck in the same argument, the same pattern, the same bad decision dressed up in new clothes, you’ll know the past doesn’t let go so easily. Freud had a phrase for this: we repeat rather than remember. The past we refuse to face doesn’t disappear; it replays itself through our behaviour, our relationships, our fears.
Lacan pushed this idea further. For him, a symptom wasn’t just a problem to fix but a message from the unconscious, a fragment of history waiting to be interpreted. You can’t delete your symptom; you can only change your relationship to it. And in doing so, you change your relationship to the past that created it. The goal isn’t to undo what’s happened but to give it meaning. To make the past speak differently.
The Greeks understood this long before Freud or Lacan. Their heroes couldn’t escape their fates, Oedipus and Agamemnon for example, each condemned to repeat the crimes of those who came before. But those stories weren’t just about inevitability or fate, they were about confrontation. Redemption only arrives when the hero remembers properly, when he faces the full weight of what has been. For them, there’s no transformation without tragedy. No awakening without memory.
Žižek, describes something similar. He says, the past isn’t fixed. It’s rewritten in the present through the way we interpret it. The meaning of an event isn’t sealed in the moment it happens but formed retroactively, through how we come to understand it later. In that sense, the past isn’t something behind us but something continually unfolding within us. Each act of remembering reshapes the story.
Memory, then, isn’t an archive. It isn’t a camera roll we scroll through for evidence of who we were. Memory is an act of creation. Every time we tell the story differently, we reshape who we are and what kind of future we might have. Reinterpreting the past doesn’t change what happened; it changes how we hold it. And that shift from repression to reflection is where freedom begins.
Of course, not all remembering is good for us. Some forgetting is necessary. Forgiveness depends on it. To forgive is to loosen the grip of memory, to let the past breathe a little so that something new can grow. Too much reverence for what’s been can paralyse action, can trap us in nostalgia or guilt. Sometimes we have to let part of the story fade so the rest of it can keep being written.
There’s no future without the past. But that isn’t a curse. It’s an invitation. To face what’s been, to carry it differently, to turn memory into movement and regret into freedom. The past isn’t an obstacle to be overcome. It’s the ground on which we stand. The only way out of it is through.