I argue with myself, trying to convince it to ask a question to artificial intelligence: Who was it, dear Mr. Intelligence, the first Lebanese to invent the idea of fortune-telling and fortune-tellers on New Year’s Eve?

I had already lost interest last year in listening to the grand astrologer Michel Hayek, after he bored me to death as I watched him repeat his predictions in the same rhythm over and over again. Not quite “zajal”, not fully rhymed, but delivered on a single, monotonous musical phrase he never strays from, chanting it with a fixed number of words. A musical phrase that, after being repeated for the fourth time, turns into pure noise, resembling the siren of an ambulance or the ring of an alarm clock whose sole function is to annoy you just enough to force you out of sleep and into your day.

I was interested in him the way one watches a magician closely, trying to uncover his trick. Where does the rabbit come from, and where does he hide it, this great charlatan? How does Michel come up with predictions that say nothing at all, in which he claims to know the future of all beings and things, even though they specify neither the timing of the event, nor its nature, nor its impact? And yet, among the Lebanese, there is all this fascination that drives many of them to pick up paper and pen and, on the last day of the year, pore over them, writing them down and keeping them to return to after every breaking news alert or personal incident.

My interest in Michel Hayek and his likes is driven by boredom, the kind that makes me addicted to these wonderful trivialities, a level of badness unlike any other. A badness one cannot resist sharing with friends just to make them laugh, as a small favor in return for what they have sent. All of this in the name of entertaining the world, without which it would be unbearable.

With this fifth paragraph, I lost my train of thought. I, who have absolutely no idea what I will bring to the end of this article, nor what it will bring me. So how can Michel Hayek and Leila Abdel Latif know what will happen over the next 366 days (this is a leap year, may God return it to us with goodness and blessings)? Not just in Ras Beirut and its surroundings, for example, but on the scale of the planet. How did our aging universe search and toil until it found, among eight billion human beings living on one of its small peripheral planets, a man (or a woman) and say: this is the one for whom I will break all the rules of physics and chemistry and the mysterious, complex concept of time, and place within them the secret of knowing what has not yet happened? I will reveal only to Leila and Michel the Preserved Tablet I have had for at least 14 billion years, and all this time I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the twentieth century so that Abu Michel would meet Um Michel, Michel would be born, grow up, and master the art of appearing annually on “MTV” to inform humanity every year of what awaits it in the coming one.

I lost interest, I say, then I asked myself after asking the universe: why do we even want to know what will happen? Most likely to avoid bad events. As if Michel, for example, sees a black cloud gathering over some square, at some unspecified time, without determining whether it is another August 4 explosion, a traffic accident, an assassination, or a lover breaking their beloved’s heart. Then we could mark in red, in the detestable style of Avichay Adraee, the areas that should be avoided during a specific period. But Michel keeps his predictions open-ended and vague in their most important details, namely the five journalistic questions: where, when, who, what, and how?

These details left to us seem unimportant to Michel because he is not a journalist but a charlatan. And charlatanism and witchcraft here are not an ugly label, especially since Michel and Leila are not harmful at all, neither damaging nor useful either. They are not a disease, nor are they a cure, nor do they have political, economic, or social side effects. They are simply like a game of blowing soap bubbles. A soap bubble has never caused a head injury or bruised one’s peace of mind. They cannot be compared to those who fire guns into the air in celebration. The media and social media are packed with far more harmful charlatans, from politicians to food vloggers, and everyone throws their predictions at us, from the shape of the next war to the shape of a fried chicken thigh. We will not go after Michel and decide to force him into precision so we can avoid consulting matters already decided. And since Michel Hayek will not give us the six winning lottery numbers in the next draw, nor place a red square around the building that will collapse in half an hour, his predictions are not useful for avoiding evil.

Another possible reason is human curiosity. And although cats are more curious than humans, they do not care as we do when Michel sees a cloud over the head of a figure who is neither big nor small, neither square nor rectangular, with a distinctive mark in a secret spot on their body. Cats nap while we analyze and suggest names. We suggest thousands of names, and when a well-known person breaks a leg, we shout: Amazing! Michel said it!

Lebanese people have kind and generous hearts. They fail to notice that these predictions are originally about them and for them, that Michel is merely another knower of the unseen and their tool to uncover it, and that they themselves are the foundation, not him. Meaning, they are not required every year to renew the air in his trumpet, continue marveling at him, and keep spinning endlessly in the cycle of receiving prophecies, analyzing them, projecting them onto events, marveling again, and so on. Just because the days and months of the year repeat does not mean time itself is circular. This is a unit of measurement we invented to organize our lives, but time moves forward. Each time Michel predicts an event and it then happens, we should draw lessons to move forward, or at least invest in predictions before they occur, not after it is too late.

For example, we could bet, just as we bet on football match results or horse races, that the figure who is neither spherical nor conical with a cloud over their head is so-and-so, place some money at a betting office, and take our chances for the new year as foreseen by the fortune-teller, palm reader, sand diviner, and strategic analyst Leila Abdel Latif. We might win, we might lose, and then try again next year. But like this, with no benefit whatsoever to be gained from predictions, this is art for art’s sake in the wrong place. Our indulgence of fortune-tellers resembles listeners indulging Umm Kulthum’s sighs, a habit that should now embarrass us, because unfortunately, it makes us look like a naïve people afflicted by general despair, prolonged disappointment, and a total loss of hope. It also exposes our shameful backwardness in catching up with the planet’s scientific progress.

More painful than this distorted image of us is our division between Michel Hayek and Leila Abdel Latif, just as we are divided over Michel Aoun and Samir Geagea, or over the party’s weapons. And if politics in Lebanon are more vague and flimsy than Michel and Leila’s predictions, that does not mean these two should gain followers and devotees who split over which of them is more skilled at bringing back a loved one or predicting the fate of Nicolás Maduro. In the age of artificial intelligence, one could at any moment last year have asked it about the fate of the unlucky comrade, and it would have drawn all scenarios for his future according to a comprehensible logic, instead of saying, as Michel did: “voices, echoes, and repercussions around Maduro, his name, his person, and those close to him.” Anyone who read about what Donald Trump amassed in the Caribbean in terms of military equipment and what he repeatedly said he would do to Maduro knows that the poor Latin Americans’ last concern in the new year would be voices and echoes.

And although the clear Trump was the one whose predictions came true, we rushed to retrieve what the vague Michel Hayek had said and to search for what he foresaw about the coming war upon us. And horror of horrors, he had predicted “the fading of the Israeli invasion and its return,” and “a peace followed by a deep breath,” and that “Israel will strike where it wants.” Really? Strike where it wants? Is this the prophecy for which the universe made us wait 14 billion years for Michel Hayek to bring us?