The missed penalty and the opportunity to choose the future

In the 90s, Globo had a show called Você Decide (You Decide).

The idea was simple and a little magical: the story would reach a critical point, stop in the middle of the crossroads, and the audience would choose the ending. Life suspended for a few minutes, waiting for the vote to decide whether the character would be saved or condemned, whether the couple would stay together or apart, whether the truth would surface or be buried. I remember thinking it was incredible! We had a power over the future!

Deep down, perhaps the charm of the show lay in a much bigger question: how much do we, in fact, decide the ending of things?

Before the game between Brazil and Norway began, the world — or at least that emotional slice of the world that is Brazil — was inside a collective Você Decide. There was a future in which Brazil advanced. There was another in which Norway went through. There was a future in which Neymar came on and settled it. There was another in which Haaland became the main character. There was a ball off the post, a substitution, a hesitation, a marking error, a second of distraction. Everything was still possibility.

And it was about those strange instants in which the future is still open, but begins to show signs of what it may become, that seemed to me a good inspiration for this article. We live as if history were a line, but perhaps it is more like a sequence of forks. Some enormous, explicit, televised. Others microscopic, almost invisible.

If the shot that killed Kennedy had missed by a few centimeters, would the 20th century have been another? If Trump had not won the last election, where would we be today? If a conversation had happened, if a letter had arrived, if someone had said yes instead of no, how many futures would have veered off?

History seems solid when we look back. But while it is happening, it is unstable, vulnerable, full of cracks.

The point is: how much of that is accident, and how much was already being prepared beforehand?

When it comes to football, I understand very little. But perhaps one does not need to understand much to notice that the game does not begin at the opening whistle. It begins before. In the call-up. In the preparation. In the team’s culture. In the courage, or the lack of it, to sustain a strategy. In the symbolic pressure of playing or not playing a certain player. In the difficulty of renewing a generation. In the energy that is put, or not, toward a possible future.

Sometimes the goal seems like chance. But chance tends to find a crack that was already open.

This holds for a game, for an election, for a company, for a country, for a life. The future is never fully controllable, but it is also not a neutral entity that simply falls from the sky. It responds, to some extent, to the conditions we create in the present. To the choices we make. To the conversations we avoid. To the skills we develop. To the negligences we keep normalizing.

Perhaps this is where speculative science fiction, the theme of my last two articles and something that has interested me so much, comes in as a kind of tool for anticipating futures.

Not as prediction. Good science fiction is not a crystal ball. It is a training ground. It is a rehearsal of consequence. It is the chance to ask “what if?” before the “what if” becomes reality. What if we organized the city in another way? What if technology were placed at the service of nature and not against it? What if artificial intelligence helped us see interdependencies that on our own we cannot grasp? What if politics were less a machine of resentment and more a practice of collective imagination?

Imagining futures is not escaping the present. It is charging the present with intention.

Perhaps one of the greatest threats to our future lies in the crisis of our imagination. Dystopia has hijacked our capacity to imagine desirable futures. Imagining was always the beginning of what we want to build. Every desirable future must, first, be authorized by imagination. What we cannot imagine we can hardly design. What we cannot design ends up being decided by cruder forces: the market, fear, the algorithm, inertia, opportunism, accident.

Of course the unpredictable exists. It always will.

The ball that deflects. The body that fails. The rain that falls at the wrong time. The virus that appears. The leader who dies. The shot that hits. The phrase that slips out. The small chance event that changes an entire life.

The future will never be an obedient spreadsheet.

But acknowledging chance should not absolve us of responsibility. On the contrary. Precisely because we do not control everything, we need to take better care of what we can influence.

Nature seems to have known this for a long time. A forest does not control every lightning bolt, every drought, every fire. But it works all the time to create conditions for continuity: diversity, redundancy, cooperation, regeneration from the edges, distributed intelligence. A living system does not eliminate the unpredictable. It learns not to depend on a single bet.

Perhaps a desirable future is just that: not the fantasy of controlling everything, but the capacity to improve the quality of our bets.

In Você Decide, the illusion was beautiful: you just had to vote and the ending would change. In life, it is more complicated. We do not decide the ending alone. We decide some conditions. Some scenes. Some gestures. Some call-ups. Some priorities. Some omissions too. And then the world mixes all of that with forces that escape our control entirely.

Perhaps the question is not “do you decide?”.

Perhaps it is: do you take part in the decision?

Because between omnipotence and impotence there is an immense territory. The territory of intention. Of preparation. Of imagination. Of care with the weak signals. Of the courage to act before the future closes.

Yesterday, for two hours, Brazil hung suspended before a fork. When the game ended, one future had come true and all the others vanished. Then the explanations began: bad luck, error, destiny, consequence, lack of courage, lack of imagination.

Perhaps it was all of that together.

History is rarely decided by a single cause. It looks more like a game: a field of forces where strategy, body, desire, preparation, accident, and fear mix until something happens.

Afterward, we call it reality.

The time has come for us to wake up to the risks of not embracing the power of our imagination.