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Perhaps reducing the future to a set of consumer choices gives us a feeling of control; if we can buy the future, then we can change it, whereas predicting events we may not be able to affect makes us anxious. In July the Department of Defense tried to set up a futures market to predict the next big terror attack, but the idea was killed, mainly because no one could stomach the idea of paying off the winners. And the ability to predict newborns' medical futures, outpacing the ability to cure illness, is looming as, well, the next big medical-ethics crisis.
After all, no thing is bigger, or next-er, than your own children. That probably explains why the answer to Dr. Spock for parents today is a series of books titled What to Expect. Anxious new moms and dads buy the books for advice on food, sleep training and so on; we keep them, I suspect, because of their lists of month-by-month developmental milestones that allow us to skip ahead to the next big thing in our children's lives, as you might flip to the end of a detective novel. ("Honey! Just one more month until he learns the pincer grip!") Wisely, the What to Expect books do not continue into the adult years ("Month 390: By the end of this month, you should be: Comparing yourself unfavorably to your college classmates ... Staring wistfully in the mirror ..."). After all, it's a lot more fun to chronicle what to expect in terms of accomplishments and growth, not regret and decline.
And there, perhaps, is the reason the next big thing holds such appeal for us. It distracts us from the fact that there is only one big thing--your life--that will culminate inexorably in the last big thing. Past cultures invented entire religions to reconcile themselves to that fact. Instead we invented Ashton and Demi, scooters and cybercars--and, of course, What's Next issues of magazines, with their cheerful promise that there will always be one more page to turn.