Living in the Future

Imagine a kid starting kindergarten. He is told on day one that his overall goal is to graduate high school in 13 years. This is the GOAL. Then, for the next 13 years, he suffers to attain the goal. Finally, he walks across the aisle and receives his diploma. He can finally be happy. 13 years of misery for those few seconds of satisfaction.

If this tale seems ridiculous, I agree with you. That's the point. No kid ever thinks like this. Kids are smarter than that. They just go to school. This idiocy is reserved for that much greater group of fools--GROWN UPS.

Grown ups are designated by their goals. Grown ups have direction. Grown ups have responsibilities. Show me a grown up who doesn't have goals and directions, and I will show you a person who lacks maturity. Goddammit, happiness must always be in the future. The present is not to be enjoyed. The future is what matters. You've got to plan, save for retirement, build your nest egg, blah blah fucking blah. You know the speech. You've been hearing it in some form or another since you were in high school.

All of this nonsense is the fallacy of living in the future. Happiness and the good life are always over the horizon. Happiness is something achieved as an endpoint. It is never found in the process. It is found only in the completion. The result of all this forward thinking is that life in the present is endless misery. Everything is judged in relation to those future goals. The irony is that even when you achieve those goals you wonder what the big deal was.

I'm not big on goals. I like having a direction, but I'm more about the process than the completion. The endpoint is just that brief pause for me as I load up for another project. Like that kid in kindergarten, I know that my job is to go to school every day. I can get psyched about graduation, but that is not going to carry me for the next 13 years. No matter how you slice it, life is always lived in the present. The present is all that exists. You can prepare for the future, but you can't actually live there.

On my job, I'm given a list of tasks to complete each day. Some days that list can be very daunting. But I learned the answer a long time ago. The way to eat an elephant is to take one bite at a time. This is how I approach my work. All work is done in the same manner. You methodically go step-by-step. My antidote to worry is to work as hard and as fast as I can. This never deviates. If I fail, I look back and see that I did my best. The rest is what it is. Most of the time, I am surprised by the results.

I take this approach to the whole of my life. I don't dwell a lot on goals. I immerse myself in the process. I find that the things I accomplish in my life come not from force of will but by force of habit. I am what I repeatedly do for good or ill. I focus on the present and the future takes care of itself. The result is the same level of achievement but with more flow and less stress.

This idea comes from the Cyrenaics. I am very critical of this group of thinkers, but I've learned to see the good in their thinking as well. The Cyrenaics gave no thought to the future. I think some thought to the future is wise, but it should not be overwhelming. This is because life is what happens while you are making other plans. Live in the moment. Seize the day.

If all of this seems free spirited, it isn't. I believe in making a decision once, and then forgetting about it. For instance, if you decide to become a physician, you go enroll in college, take premed, take your MCAT, go to med school, etc. This will take years and mean enduring hard work, poverty, and what have you. The real goal isn't becoming a doctor. The real goal is learning to like school, work, and not minding as your peers start careers earlier than you.

The focus on goals is a New Thought myth. It is the belief that goals are achieved through will power. Will power takes motivation. Motivation requires thought. Thought requires dreams. These dreams lead to goal making, daydreaming, and a bankruptcy of the present. This focus drains the present of all the joy and sets up unrealistic expectations about the future. When that future comes, it never matches the fantasy. You realize too late that life is what happens while you are making other plans.

When you live in the present and experience flow, you find motivation in the activity, and it is the activity and not your will power that makes things happen. Most of the time, you should just work and see what happens. This is the philosophy I apply to this blog here. I just write, and I wait to see what happens. I have written things that I thought were going to cause a big splash. Those were quickly forgotten. Other things I wrote with hardly much thought at all, and they became a big deal to a lot of readers. But if my goal was to be Mr. Top Blogger, I would have abandoned this project a long time ago. I just write and enjoy the work, and if other people like it, that's cool with me. At the end of the day, I can't make people like my work, and I don't know what they like. I only know what I like, and I serve that interest.

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