In a recent Wall Street Journal article penned by Jason Zweig, he looks at the ability of trained, professional analysts to make a prediction about where the stock market is headed in the coming year. The goal he points out is to not be too wrong and not be too right, a sort of Goldilocks approach that wants to be somewhere in the middle – a sort of don’t-fire-me zone.

When prognosticators look forward, they have little else to base their assumptions on than what happened in the past. Making correlations with what you know reflects almost a superstitious divining of the future. Sort of “the market tanked the day the crows gathered on the power line outside my office window” omen that is not much better than examining technical indicators or past performance as a window into the future.

He laments that: “First and foremost, the future is the realm of surprises; no one, no matter how expert, can reliably foresee what will happen and how people will react to it.” And this is coming from people who have so much data at their disposal that seeing forward a month from now should be easy. Truth is, a month can make the difference and unwind all of the year-long guesses these experts might make.

Computers have made the job easier and harder. You can feed them with information and through cold, hard clinical analysis tell the person who fed the info what to expect. Yet somewhere between that point and the telling, the explanation changes. Zweig blames it on intellectual emphasis, a kind of on-the-spot interpretation of what the data revealed. Wall Street has long known of this human/technical diversion and made light of the game.

Tom Stark of Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia manages a database of information on the subject of predictions aptly titled the Survey of Professional Forecasters, has found that there are simply too many variables at play in any given year, the prognosticators inability to separate now from then, and lastly, the gnawing feeling that somehow, something was missed. As Lao Tzu once wrote: “Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, have no knowledge.”

So where does that leave us, the intrepid investor looking to make a retirement plan that will work in a future we can’t even imagine? We want to predict but we have no knowledge about so many things – inflation, taxes, market performance, the global economy, the pressure of our own household, our health, etc. How can we possibly hope to develop a plan that resembles something more than a scribble on an Etcha-sketch?

In truth, we can’t. At least not with any accuracy. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In the current thinking, we have changed from the pursuit of getting as much as possible to getting enough to survive on. More would be better, but experience has taught us that chasing that concept can put us in harm’s way of more risk than we needed.

And risk, they suggest in this decumulative approach, might be good for gaining assets but it puts those assets on the line each day. Decumulation looks at predicting how much you will need to retire; not how you will need to amass that number. It removes risk and replaces it with working longer.

And risk adds costs. With the focus on fees – which in itself is not a bad thing at all – but forces us to gravitate towards less risky investments. Cheaper yes but less risk means fewer rewards.

So how do we get from point A (right now) to point B (10, 20,30 or 40-years into the future)? You have to understand that it is not a linear journey. It is not a straightline that suggests if you do this, the result will be predictable. We want the journey to be blue skies and long stretch of highway. And if that is the analogy you want to use, let’s take it.

Blue skies are great. But in a journey of any duration, the sun will either start at your back and be in your eyes by nightfall or the other way around. It will distract oncoming traffic until it distracts you. So blue skies are nice, but subtle shades of grey make the journey much more doable for you and any traffic you might encounter.

A long-stretch of highway is filled with potential. Although we don’t and can’t predict whether our car will get us there without problems. We can see the gas gauge and understand the needs of the passengers for the occasional pit stop so stopping at some point, taking a breather is expected, even anticipated.

So if the journey to retirement is the same as that – or something we perceive to be like that, shouldn’t we plan on making the occasional stop to reevaluate, readjust or simply take a look at where we have been and where we are headed. If the sky is too blue, we should worry about whether we need some sort of protection from the glare. The highway too straight might let monotony set in and cause us to doze off.

All you can predict with such a journey is that you will arrive. The same with retirement and your plan. The only prediction you can make is you’ll get there. But you can’t get there without the occasional review of how. So stop playing with the calculators. Stop looking for someone to predict the future. These are tools to help you check the gas in the tank and the quality of the road you travel. You are the journey. Your money is the car. And the future is only recognizable once it arrives. You are the answer.