The future you rehearse most often is still only one possible arrival.

Repetition makes a scenario feel likely rather than making it true. The version of next year you have run through a hundred times, good or bad, has become vivid through practice, and vividness gets mistaken for probability. Meanwhile the futures you have never pictured are just as available, and the one that actually arrives is usually not on the list at all. Rehearsal is preparation, not prediction.

Write down the future you keep rehearsing, then write two others beside it that you have never bothered to imagine. Seeing the alternatives in the same handwriting takes some of the authority out of the familiar one.