We can know more about the end of someone’s life than they ever did.

You can read a biography and know how it ended while the subject spent decades not knowing. They made plans, feared the wrong things, hoped about outcomes already determined from where you sit. That asymmetry is strange and it is also your situation exactly, viewed from any point in the future. You are living the part they could not see.

Let that soften your judgment of people who could not know what was coming. And let it inform how you treat your own uncertainty, which is not a personal failing but the ordinary condition of being inside a life. Nobody has ever had the ending in advance.