This Moment Is All There Is
Entry for 07-September-2024 - on the tension between living in the present and building for the future.
It’s always right now.
That is literally the only place you ever actually exist. Not in your cringey memories from ten years ago, and definitely not in whatever grand master plans you cooked up for tomorrow. You’re just sitting here, right now, reading this.
But here is the catch. The people who actually get things done and build stuff aren’t just sitting around vibing in the present moment. They work almost entirely for the future. You lay a brick today and hope it turns into a house at some point. You grind now for a payoff that’s way down the road.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.” Which sounds super cool until you realize you still have to pay rent.
Emotionally speaking, though, only “now” is real. Every single thing you’ve ever experienced, every awkward conversation, every decent pizza you’ve eaten, happened in the present. You’ve never actually lived in the future. The future is just fanfiction you write in your head while you’re busy ignoring the present.
Allen Saunders originally wrote it, and John Lennon made it famous: “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” That hits hard because it’s irritatingly accurate. We spend half our lives stressing over spreadsheets or 5-year plans, while the actual living slips right past us.
Viktor Frankl survived Nazi concentration camps and dropped one of the heaviest quotes I keep returning to: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing - the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” He meant that the present moment is the only real territory we actually control.
So society basically plays a massive joke on us. We’re bombarded with conflicting advice.
On one hand, hustle, invest, delay gratification, think long-term. Because if you just live for today, you end up broke and sleeping on a friend’s couch. Fair enough.
On the other hand, be mindful, stay present, don’t miss your kids growing up, stop and smell the roses. Because if you only live for retirement, you’re going to wake up at 65 realizing you forgot to actually live. Also fair.
It’s a completely unwinnable game.
Managing this mess is less about finding “balance” and more about aggressively juggling the two. You kind of just have to hold your obnoxious 5-year plan in one hand and a decent cup of chai in the other, and try to figure out which one deserves your attention at 2 PM on a Tuesday.
Buddha put it like this: “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.” Easy for a guy sitting under a tree to say, but he wasn’t wrong.
Your life is basically a subscription service of moments. One right after the other, with zero option to pause. You don’t get to stockpile today’s 24 hours into a savings account to spend when you finally retire.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether you should be meditating or grinding for the future. It’s whether the future you’re stressing over is actually worth burning all the “nows” you’ll never get back.