These days, I'm not so sure the past is a foreign country where people do things differently, but is really more of rogue nation under martial law. In short, if I had to pin the past down with a geographical simile, I'd say the past was rather like Turkmenistan.
And of course you are President for life in this Turkmen past. Revisionist memory erects colossal equestrian statues of yourself in the most de Chirico-esque squares of your mind. Interior monologues are restricted to only repeating the self-aggrandizing party line, and any dissenting synapse that dares questions your supreme authority is ominously "disappeared."
Of course, establishing your sense of the past in Central Asia means it's always threatened by revolutionary insurgents, which is why you still feel anxious and exposed when remembering that thing that happened eight years ago. It's a stress point in your ego's Great Wall. Frankly, you'd be better off renouncing this dictatorial sovereignty over the past and relocating your new Anarcho-syndicalist awareness to Switzerland.
So henceforth the past will be like Switzerland; people don't dwell on it there. They are simply forever in the cuckoo clocked moment.
But what does all this say about the future? Well, the future is usually like an Orwellian dystopia where everything people do is supervised by Big Brother. Or perhaps the future will be like a spaceship traveling to an unknown galaxy where people can't actually do anything anyway because they are all sleeping in suspended animation for centuries. Or maybe there will be no future to speak of since humanity has been wiped out by Coronavirus? It's a tough call.
Personally, I think the future will be much like the present; people will do things much the same way only with different tools. At our current precarious point in time, I'm not sure whether such a passively apathetic vision of Things To Come is optimistic or pessimistic. But at least we'll have one. So there's that, I guess.
