How to Stop Living in the Future

You are not a problem to be solved. You are a mystery. In a culture of continuous self-improvement and optimization, it is easy to fall into the trap of forever waiting for life to arrive. In an article titled The Examined Life in the Age of Optimization, Rodney King offers the antidote below. I will quote him at length and highly recommend reading the entire article.   

At the centre of nearly all these old [philosophical] exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.

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The examined life interrupts that deferral, and not gently. It insists on the life that is here, in this body, on this unremarkable morning, among these particular and unchosen people, rather than the cleaner and more creditable life that is forever about to begin once the present one has been fixed.

This week, I invite you to notice: 

How much do I live in the future, glancing toward the next benchmark? How well do I live in the present, mindful of each moment I am in? What will need to change for me to live a more examined life? 

God bless,
Dan