What’s So Great About “The Now”?
A logical look at living life in the present
Always In The Now
If you’ve spent any amount of time perusing the self-help or spirituality sections of a bookstore, you’ve probably spied a significant number of books extolling the virtues of hanging out in or living in or being in the capital-N Now.
But isn’t that a bit redundant? Aren’t we always living in the Now?
What’s so great about the Now anyway?
Try as we might, we cannot seem to live in any other time but the brutally persistent present.
Of course, those self-help and spirituality books are not (usually) making claims about spacetime or our capacity to travel through it at any other pace or place than second-by-second in our thoroughly reality-bound bodies.
The point, I’ve inferred and come to understand through my own experience dealing with the past and present and future, is that the living in the Now sermon is about recognising the mental energy we illogically spend worrying about things that have either happened and can’t be changed or that haven’t happened and can’t be known.
The Living in the Now sermon is a roundabout, slightly more spiritual way of expressing a logical deduction about how we should spend our mental energy based on the fact that the past can’t be changed and the future is uncertain.
The Past Can’t Be Changed
Should we live in the past?
All our most precious memories are there — the fun times we had, our first loves, our greatest achievements — but so are all the stupid things we said or did, all our failures, and the times we gambled our life-savings on some stock or crypto poocoin, or failed to.
We might regret our actions or long for the times in which we were happy, but we simply can’t change them and we can’t go back.
Bad Choices, Good Times
What can we do about the terrible decisions we made, the ones fanning the flames of regret and rumination?
Well, we can’t change them — that sucks — but we can at least learn from them.
We’ll probably get over them eventually anyway, and more so if we learn our lesson from them, and even more so if we have a chance to redeem ourselves by applying what we’ve learned to a new-but-similar situation that calls for an equivalent decision.
That would be great, but you’re not going to learn that lesson and successfully avoid making the same mistake if you just spend all your time and energy ruminating and beating yourself about it.
There is a logical (and morally required) but limited amount of energy that should be allocated to analysing the past in order to understand what you did wrong and what you can do better.
And no more. You cannot do better than that.
But you better do it fast and while things are still fresh, lest you start forgetting what you did and leaving space to do it again.
So get it done fast and get back to the present.
Pining for the Past
What if your thoughts about the past are less about regret and more about longing — about pining for the past?
Well, what’s so special about those times?
You might be pining for a time that was filled with physical and material pleasure that you can no longer afford, access or sustain.
But the positive quality of physical pleasures doesn’t last very long without you eventually having to ramp up dosages to addictive levels.
So there’s not much point seeking these out with too much fervour because it’s an unsustainable way to maintain happiness.
Besides, the happiness part of those experiences was probably due to something else:
The longing for these things or for times that were marked by them is usually a longing for the sense of fun and freedom. But that fun and freedom seems to just be a property of being young, more than anything else.
The special thing about being young is that we tend not to spend much time thinking about the future.
Either because we can expect so much of it still yet come, or because we haven’t had the experiences that thrust us into the threat of it, or because we don’t yet have the cognitive maturity to do the calculations needed to concern ourselves with it.
However we avoid thinking about the future when we’re young, that avoidance seems to be the root of the happiness we long to return to.
But that happiness was in our heads, it was a property of how we were thinking (or not), and not of the situation we were doing the thinking in.
So when we’re longing to return to some golden age of our lives, we’re really looking for a place inside our heads.
That place exists, we’ve been there before, but thankfully it’s not in the past — it can be found at any time in the present, we just need to know where to look.
In fact, that place can only be found in the present.
Which is why finding it requires you to stop looking for it, because looking for it uses the energy your brain needs to get there.
The Future is Uncertain
Ok, we can’t change the past, but what about the future?
We may not be able to change the future either, but we can at least acknowledge that it’s uncertain, and that we have the experience of creating our futures through the decision we make in the present.
But what does it mean (for how we think about our lives) for the future to be uncertain?
Well, by definition it means that we don’t know what is going to happen, which means we can hope, and dream, and worry about what might happen.
Of course, that uncertainty isn’t uniform — some things are more likely than others; you can be fairly certain of what’s going to happen when you walk down the street to buy bread, for example.
But this relative certainty diminishes exponentially the further into the future you look.
Unfortunately, the human mind, like space, abhors a vacuum, and so we go about populating that future with all our worst fears and wildest dreams and disintegrating hopes.
To our imagination, this void of future possibilities is an endless, bottomless pit, and a seemingly infinite amount of Future is always there, no matter how far we go into it.
And yet, we will never actually experience that future.
Because whatever future does exist, whatever future we will find ourselves in, we will only ever get there through the present, and when we find ourselves, we’ll find ourselves in the present.
Hopes and Dreams
If we’re worried about something happening, well, we won’t actually know if it will happen until it’s presently happening.
And we will only be able to deal with it when it’s presently happening.
And if we can do anything to avoid it or mitigate it, then we’ll have to do that thing in whatever present we find ourselves.
Either way, at no point will worrying about it be the best use of our time now, here, in the present.
Alternatively, if we hope for something to happen — some meaningful occurrence or some grand dream — well it’s either out of our control, or if it’s in our control then it requires doing things with focus and dedication, and which can only be done now, in the present.
By doing so, you’ll either get where you think you want to go or you won’t, and you won’t know what it was – within your control or not – that got you there.
So you can only do what you can do now, and if you don’t know whether you’ll get where you want go, or whether what you’re doing will get you there, then you might as well make what you’re doing now something you’re happy to do.
If you spend all your time worrying about or hoping for the future, then you’ll fail to focus on what you’re doing now, and you’ll fail to prepare for that future, thereby increasing the chances of bringing about the future you’re worried about, or failing to bring about the future you hoped for.
In this sense, hoping for the future and worrying about it share the same genetics:
Wasting energy thinking about a future you can’t be certain of.
Time and Energy
The mandate to live in the Now is the logical result of figuring out how to spend your mental energy in the face of an uncertain future and an unalterable past.
What’s strange is that making this realisation and finally letting either end of this temporal tug-of-war go feels really, life-changingly good.
Not just normally good — like cake or getting a massage — but existentially pleasant in the very core of your being, with a certain weightlessness in the brain that usually comes from getting up too fast, expect without the dizziness.
This is probably because you have a brain and that brain uses a lot of energy, and from the perspective of your conscious self you can only really distribute that energy to one part of the brain, or one strain of thinking, at a time.
Worrying about the future or ruminating about the past takes energy, so whatever energy you’re allocating to pathological foresight or regretful rumination is taken away from the energy you have to focus on your life and the world around you as it’s actually, currently happening.
Sure, you can’t ignore the past — your actions and choices made you who you are, and it’s important to evaluate those actions and choices to learn from your mistakes.
And you can’t ignore the future — considering what might happen and making reasonable plans or preparations for those outcomes is an important way to not get bulldozed by bad events.
But you also can’t ignore the present.
That’s because life, the part of life that you actually experience, is only ever happening now, here, in the present.
What’s so great about the Now is that it’s all you really have, and if you’re not living in it then you’re not really living.
So start living in it, now.
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