Learn English – “looking back from now”: is it looking back from the future to now or looking back to the past from this moment

meaning-in-contexttime

original sentence (1999 China's post-grad entrance exam):

People looking back 5 or 10 years from now may well wonder why so few companies took the online plunge.

http://www.langlib.com/Reading/SentenceAnalysis/ReadingSentence/NjYxLTQtNA==

And how should I rewrite the sentence that means the other way?

Best Answer

English often changes verb tense and focus depending on the imagined point of view. In this case it is of the future person, looking back at a particular point in time. The original sentence is saying that, 5 to 10 years from now, people will look back at this moment and wonder why something was true.

Another example:

Although you think your life is hard, twenty years from now you will look back and remember how happy you were.

Notice the sentence uses the past tense "how happy you were" even though the person is currently experiencing that happiness. This is because the speaker imagines the perspective of the person, twenty years in the future, looking back at a past event.

If instead you want to say a future person looking back on events even further in the past than the current moment, the language is not much different. However you usually have to provide some kind of context to explain the relationship of the different time frames:

Scholars 10 years from now may look back at the events that led up to this moment, and wonder how we ever let things get so bad.

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