The Eternal Present
The Hidden Influence of the Time You have Left
Memento Mori
This may come as a surprise to you, but you and I will die one day. Shocking, I know, but it is true. 100% of all people who lived have died, will die, or are in the process of dying[1].
This reminder of our mortality is not without cause. I remind you of this because it represents an important, yet often-overlooked, part of our plans – time horizons. Plans are naturally constrained by how long you have to implement them and how long you must predict in order to conceive of them, with the most obvious of time horizons being the lifespan. Your plan to go on errands must complete in time to pick the kids up from school. Your plan to get a passport must complete before the day of your flight.
Time and timing matter.
The individual’s perception of time is also a key matter. One’s assessment of how much time they have left and where their best years were, are, or will be will naturally influence where they decide to put their focus on. Traditionally, these mentalities roughly correspond to the young, the adult, and the old, each mapping to those who live in the future, those who live in the present, and those who live in the past.
The Young live in the Future
Most people who are young both believe that their best years are ahead of them, and that they have plenty of time left. Generally, they are right – they are currently still bound by the restrictions of being a minor (getting stricter and stricter every year) and their expected lifespan is mostly ahead of them.
As the young are usually ensconced in their parents’ protection, they start out naïve and willing to try anything – they lack personal past experience. In order to get this experience, they actively attempt to copy adults and acquire experience. Time appears to move slowly for them, as they do not have the years under their belt to give them perspective on how quickly things do pass. Everything appears to be a crisis to the young, because they haven’t seen anything like that before – because they’re young.
What they do have, though, are optimism and freedom. Free from the framing effects of ideas and able to look at things with fresh eyes, the young can see connections and ideas that adults or seniors would miss. Though it is easy to mislead them and woo them with false promises, they are also the ones most likely to see new ways and reach their potential.
That reaching of their potential is what those who live in the future live for. Always improving themselves, willing to sacrifice present comfort for future gains, and without a past to look back on, those that live in the future are constantly looking for new trails to blaze, new roads to travel – because everything is new to them.
The Adults live in the Present
Those that live in the present believe that these years are their best years, and their focuses are survival – and optimization. Most working-age adults are in this category, as they are currently in, just out of, or looking forward to their highest-earning years. They are likely juggling many things – work, family, aging parents, and that’s the central truth of those that live in the present. They need everything now, or soon, and any opportunity is worth taking.
To them, their past is full of regrets – they believe they could be in a much better place had they done things different. Their future is a distant dream, the present besieging them and preventing them from reaching out for it. The familiar refrains of “job, family, aging parents, and no savings” box them into their current life. These constraints make them less likely to discover anything new – but they have their own field of knowledge.
They are experts in the present and what already exists. Forced by their responsibilities to be all-rounders and see things as they are, adults have a deeper and broader knowledge of the details of how the world currently works. Constantly sharpened by their experiences in the world, this gives them a clear sense of what their priorities are, allowing them to optimize with clear goals in mind, advancing the world step by step. This gives them the means to make incremental improvements and modifications, but makes it difficult to conceive of something radical – unless they brought it from their childhood.
Those that live in the present strive for optimization. Constrained by their many responsibilities, those that live in the present prioritize relentlessly, push their limits, and hope to one day enjoy the fruits of their labors. These are their best years, and the goal is to make the best of them.
The Old live in the Past
Those that live in the past believe that their best years are behind them, and they have the scars and experience to show for them. Seniors, the retired, and others belong in this category, as they are now living on pensions and investments, and have a lot of time. With much fewer of their adult responsibilities and not a lot of life left, their focus is on living out all their adulthood dreams.
To them, the past holds all the good – the best years of their lives are behind them, and any regrets they have (hopefully) are no longer regrets – the life they have now is enough. The future holds little for them – even if the mind is willing, the body is weak, and the risk of ruining whatever time is left with injuries or illness is too high. As such, they live a regimented life – not one without pleasures, but certainly one missing many things that used to make life worth living.
Reflection and turning inward with time are the true strengths of those who live in the past. Armed with the experience of years as adults and the time to digest their experiences, those who live in the past are best-suited to understanding knotty problems. Traditionally, their role has been to take on lighter duties like child-rearing and dispensing advice to those younger than them – duties that require clarity of the mind rather than the health of the body.
This wealth of experience, however, also leads to the reverse problem as those that live in the future. Loaded with experiences that may no longer be relevant and traditions no longer adhered to, those that live in the past must grapple with how things have changed since they have last done things. Their previous positions and ideas likely prevent them from seeing opportunities nonexistent when they were active.
Those that live in the past strive for purpose. Having put their best days behind them and without responsibilities, they search for new battles to take up – both to relive the old days and put their knowledge to good use.
Convergence to the Eternal Now
I have described here the traditional roles – the hot-blooded young person, the responsible adult, and the wise old person – but they are only that, traditional. These are the divisions around which our society is based, inherited from a time where almost all work was physical work and required strength of body to perform. That shaped our ideas and traditions for thousands of years – at least before the modern era.
With our current abundance of energy, machinery, and computing power, many of the jobs that used to be manual have now been taken over by machines[2]. Inevitably, this moves us away from jobs that do not require human intervention to those that do – often jobs with a heavy social element or requiring judgment, all of which are jobs that an older person could still do. Today, many of the best-paid modern jobs are white-collar work, and asset management and ownership have no sell-by date.
This, however, comes with a caveat. With the prominence of debt in the modern economy and low interest rates causing perennial inflation, poorer seniors relying on a pension may not have a choice other than to go back to work. Seniors worldwide are already bracing for life without retirement or heading back to work from retirement to deal with the ever-rising costs of living – particularly as they live longer and longer than social security funds budgeted for. The less said about Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, the better.
There is also greater and greater emphasis on career preparation among both parents and children. Believing that starting their children earlier will help them go on to better careers, the parents of today push their children to do things that will increase their academic or social standing as children in order to prepare them for adulthood. The culmination of this mentality is Tiger Parenting – where the child’s exploratory tendencies take a back seat to preparing them for the world their parents are facing – the world of the now. If you’re wondering why kids feel so adult these days – whether it’s preparing for career, social media self-promotion, or espousing causes at ages where you didn’t know a thing – this is why.
This is what I call a convergence to the eternal now – where the adult mentality of optimization under constraints begins to take over all facets of life, whether or not we have the maturity to understand what our optimization priorities are. While this may increase one’s overall lifetime productivity (and income), this devotion to the eternal present has an overarching and dangerous consequence – the rule of pragmatism and technique above all else, and the rejection of tradition and that bane of humanity - path dependency.
In fact, what happens appears closer to permanent adolescence - that period where the young pretend to be adults without full understanding what it means to be adults. Implicit in the modern trend of “adulting” is that the adulter (not the adulterer, that’s entirely different) does not understand why they do what they do, only that it is something adults do and therefore worthy of copying.
That this also happens to be a very profitable space where megacorporations can sell product to these people is entirely coincidental and definitely not an excellent motivation to perpetuate this trend.
Trans Ideology
The most egregious example of this eternal adolescence I can find is in the trans ideology. Transgenders are, essentially, people who pretend to be the other sex for whatever reason. They believe that they were “born in the wrong body”, and are therefore trapped on the other side of the gender divide. This contrasts Thai ladyboys, who often pretend to be the opposite gender only to make money, and return to being male when they go back to their home villages.
Transgenders often attempt to go on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and some even go so far as to get surgical procedures done to come closer to their gender - facial feminization surgery (FFS) and Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS). They willingly subject themselves to hormonal imbalances in order to look like their desired gender and get permanent, irreversible surgeries that involve getting false genitalia.
Being the T in LGBT, Transgenders are also heavily-supported in the mainstream. As part of trans rights, transgenders evven advocate supporting child transitions through the use of hormone blockers to delay or even stop puberty, which are likely to cause permanent damage - as most of the bone growth and muscle growth that makes a child an adult occurs during puberty.
The transgender movement fundamentally rejects both the past and the future for the sake of the present. By sterilizing oneself through hormone replacement or sexual reassignment, they deny their future potential. By rejecting the body they were born in and the gender they were born into, they reject path dependency, fighting the good fight in order to push the boundaries of modern optimization. Rejecting both the past and the future, they must live in the eternal now, often becoming hedonistic pleasure-seekers who live on Twitter, all the while spending liberally on hobbies, hormones, and surgeries, as well as supporting other transes on Patreon or Ko-Fi.
In these three paragraphs, we see that trans people are cash cows, buying hormones and surgeries that give them status while fighting bravely for a cause, pretending to be mature adults fighting for what they believe in when in fact they are simply living out an adolescent delusion of being trapped in the wrong body. The eternal quest to become the opposite sex functions as a release valve, a quest that reveals that there were simply no other worthy challenges for them.
By their (absence of) fruits ye shall know them.
While I picked out transgenderism in particular, in essence, most modern trends are in a similar vein. They reject path dependency and embrace current results, often also at the cost of future possibilities. Corporate stock buybacks, maximizing quarterly earnings, cryptocurrency speculation and non-fungible tokens - all of these things fundamentally exist on an appeal of rejecting the past and an acknowledgement by the youth that there is no future.
If that’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy, I don’t know what is.
The Captain is a Flowchart[3]
In a world where our primary goal is to optimize the current existing system, eschewing additions or revisions because they would cut into profit margins or cause discontinuities in progress, technique becomes the tyrant that rules over us all. Technique, or, as Samuel Matlack puts Jacques Ellul’s definition of it, the one best way, refers to the best way to organize affairs for today, and perhaps of all time. In essence, Ellul says that society is hurtling towards inaction – inaction because we will spend more time trying to find the one best way than actually doing anything. Idiosyncrasies and personal ideas are set aside in the name of better technique. Samuel Matlack brings up that a key problem is that optimization foists unreachable standards upon us. I want to go one step further – technique presupposes well-articulated goals and measures, many of which will naturally conflict, and some of which will be mutually exclusive, and therefore, convergence to a single solution is impossible.
As I wrote previously in The “Good” “Fight”, the goals that an individual looks for are merely proxies for a struggle with a worthy reward. People choose different goals depending on what they find worth fighting for. The issue comes when you need to gather different people into a room to decide on the technique to be used – or the contents of the commanding flowchart. Chaos will ensue, with different goals being emphasized and promoted over others based on the people in attendance, things that are required but were overlooked rear their ugly head, and nobody knows what’s going on anymore, and why. None of the optimism of the young or the wisdom of the old is allowed to enter into decisions – only the techniques of the present, without the conscious valuation of optimizable values that makes that technique truly powerful.
The most perilous example of the convergence towards the present, I think, is the declining total fertility rate worldwide. Children are a very long-term investment, requiring lots of expenses over a very long period. As hope dies due to worsening economic prospects and everyone trying to work their way out of it or dull the pain, while also finding the money and time to Tiger Parent their kids to give them a leg-up, the primacy of living for the present today, of optimizing for current gains, precludes raising children. Worst of all is that it is exactly those that know how to succeed that you lose most of - those who make it in the big city and get all the best jobs are the ones who are least able to have children.
The ship has no captain anymore. He’s abdicated to a flowchart that says “full speed ahead, for path independency, efficiency, and profit!”
When to Live
So, should you live in the past, present, or future? Naturally, as society converges to living for the present, I think you must always keep an eye on the present. Like it or not, the tyranny of technique will reign over you, so you might as well get used to the yoke.
That being said, I feel that you should live in the time that matches your age or station in life. Traditions are answers where we have forgotten the matching question – and to trifle with them lightly is to court a return of the problem[4]. And as nice as it is to believe that you can change the past, collective wisdom often has good reasons for being the way it is. Striving in your youth, grinding in your adulthood, living quietly in your old age - even to my modern mind, the traditional framework sounds pretty good.
It worked fine for your ancestors - they made you, and the world you live in, meaning they definitely got some things right.
[1] Source: It was revealed to me in a dream.
[2] Examples: “Computer” used to be a job title, not a device.
[3] This metaphor began with There Is No Captain, my second piece on the site.
[4] According to Wikiquote, this quote is from Donald Kingsbury in Courtship Right
(I can't believe nobody commented on this one?)
You write some really good things in 2.800 words There are so many seeds of ideas that should be expanded upon. I will add things to my blog. I think that you are a natural optimist. I am not, while not really a pessimist . I am thinking that so many of our institutions, commercial, financial and governmental, are in such a grid-lock, I don't see how they can be corrected from the inside. But I am definitely not a revolutionary either. I am not denying what you say, but let's look at a fuller picture. It is not so simple on all fronts.
1. Timing: Years stretch out and they are hard to grasp, Seasons are good for farmers, months don't mean much, accept for kids looking forward to summer vacation. I began to say that you have 4,000 weeks of life. The point being; what did you do with last week? Merely flush it through the portals of time?? So, life is only what you make out of it, please get with it.
The three eras;
2. "Some young live for the future". Boy, they have to have a vision, from their parents and good teachers. I'd say many don't have any concept at all of a future. From their role-model, you go to work every day, you come back exhausted and irritable, complain to the wife and kids, and judge that I'm not excelling enough. (Perhaps they mean well)? "I used to get to play, but now I have to do all the things that they tell me that I'm no good at."
At 20, I am over the hill, all washed up. I'll go out and see what interesting trouble all the other young "losers" are getting into. I say that it is very tough for millions and millions. This is the major challenge for society.
I also agree that there are millions of the lucky ones, your quote: "What they do have, though, are optimism and freedom. Free from the framing effects of ideas and able to look at things with fresh eyes, the young can see connections and ideas that adults or seniors would miss." The connections are all there for everyone to see, but the adults are captured in T. I. N. A. (There Is No Alternative).
3. Adults can also live in dreams. But when they get some financial stability, and/or various expertise's, like they can work in business, or software or be a building contractor, or construction worker, they believe they have income options, and they begin to take on OBLIGATIONS.
Cars to pay for, sports equipment, travel, houses, not to mention a family and children, school expenses, health of the family, really endless. Obligations are a present tense balancing act, which force adults into the never ending present, (the grind). You make it sound good, like "priorities", and optimization, but also use necessities, and head-above-water metaphors. While their objectives are in the present, their state of mind is anywhere BUT in the present. (That is a very big discussion.)
They can also conceive of something radical. but they can't afford to risk jumping onto a new horse. So many already know that their life is not optimal, or even, it doesn't work, but there is no "cushion" to give time for an alternative search. They're locked in.
4. The old do what they did before. If that was little or nothing, they do nothing. Or just dote on the grandchildren, and program in all the defects like they did to their own children. Give all the unfounded hope, (unfounded as proved out by their own life), under the guise of optimism and conventional wisdom. It is very difficult - I don't say deflate children's optimism. Frankly I don't know how to handle it, for it is a very delicate ground.
I know some seniors very very well. They have past experience but they don't live in the past at all. They are more in the present than at any other time in their life. Really they are oligarchs, (on a small scale), all of their time is their own, and their creativity is un-bounded. With that vibrant attitude, their health is also vibrant. (Of course, like you said in the beginning, they will have to "check-out" of the hotel-world at some time.) Maybe they consider that they have 500 weeks left, and will use every one to the maximum.
5. Jobs are dependent on what is the prevailing practice. In the past when enterprises were small, they also were many. So innovation and competition forced the prevailing practice to innovate and use human capital to the max. In this age there is great consolidation, the small are forced out of business, by the so-called competition of the Goliaths. So jobs become whatever those few enterprises decide they are, and customers have to swallow it.
I'll give one example: Call your bank, (or any other consolidated company). You get to talk to a computer. (It is called "intelligence" with the greatest stretch of the imagination). First they run you around to waste your time, so maybe you won't call back. Then they say "Please say that again in 3 to 5 words". Where is the "job" in that scenario?
6. The child’s exploratory tendencies take a back seat to preparing them for the world their parents believe in. Basically the child's natural learning is crushed, and they become mechanical (if they submit), or the become rebels. In America so far from Jan to July 2023 there have been 340 mass shootings (defined as where more than 4 people were shot). Tracked by "Gun Violence Archive".
I really like this sentence: "In fact, what happens appears closer to permanent adolescence - that period where the young PRETEND to be adults without full understanding what it means to be adults. We do not understand why we do what we do, only that it is something that other adults do."
That is why you and I are writing. You said it before: "The goal is to one day be able to understand the world around you – to see the currents of current events, rather than feel adrift in an endless ocean of chaos."
7. Then you talk about TRANS. Wow, that is brave of you, such a toxic subject. I maintain that not only do trans people not understand gender. NOBODY DOES. A post should be written on Gender, what is it? I have my ideas, but not in a comment on Future/Present/ &Past.
8. One step further – technique presupposes well-articulated goals and measures, many of which will naturally conflict, and some of which will be mutually exclusive, and therefore, convergence to a single solution is impossible. So then, "technique" is the precursor to fascism? You write a lot about technique. I think that you mean organizing mass efforts, and the formula for it. It is the opposite of freedom, which, I think you're saying that old-fashion freedom is obsolete, (In this gigantic enterprise environment.) "Struggle with a worthy reward" is another wonderful topic, but later.
9. Declining fertility rate is the compromise with lifestyle that a family can no longer afford. So don't start a family. I also think one population segment has been disillusioned with their own childhood, parents under stress, and they want nothing to do with it. It must be different in different parts of the world.
10. At one point you said that past trends and methods may no longer be relevant. Will Seniors miss the new modern opportunities? Well, maybe they won't see all the beauty coming out of the "Gig-Economy", where no social benefits need be offered to anyone. But they are not dreaming of returning to the past. They just see the alarming trends in dumbing-down society, and the limited range of choices, climb onto Facebook and Youtube or your GIG will die. It is a very perilous existence in this age, and you can be de-platformed and even de-banked at any time on a false whim. Some people have been disallowed a bank account anywhere in their own country.
I'll stay tuned.
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