Dead to the moment
Imagine you wake up tomorrow and learn you have five years left to live.
Not exactly 5 years, maybe 4 years 9 months, maybe 5 years 2 months. But around 5.
What would you change? What would you do differently than what you are doing right now? You’d probably stop doing a lot of things. You have only five years left after all. Why bother?
I would probably just sell everything, find a house with a view of the sea, and spend my last years reading and hosting friends.
What if it was around 10 years? That is twice as long. Depending on your age, that might be half or a third of your entire life so far. Dropping everything, knowing there are ten more good years, is a bit extreme. Maybe, during these ten years, you could work on your legacy™.
As for me, I’d probably try even harder to answer the question that has occupied me for the past 15 years: What is a good life?
The thing is, no one knows how long they have left. In Western countries, the average life expectancy is around 80ish. (Knock on wood.)
I'm 33, so that's nearly 50 years left. But it's highly unlikely that at 80, I'm mentally and physically as fit as I am right now. So let's remove 5 years from this: 45 left.
Of these 45 years, I will be asleep for a third. And I need to, because otherwise it will be even less. “I can sleep when I die” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
30 years left. So what would I do now?
Here is the thing: I don't have 30 years left. I might have them on paper (again, knock on wood), but in reality, this number is much, much smaller.
Because during these 30 years, for the majority of the time, I won't be truly present. I won't live in the moment, but instead either regret the past or worry about the future. And worse, I'll be wasting my time with trivial things that don't bring me any closer to... well, anything.
We all do this. We worry about the future and how much time we have left, and then we spend most of our days scrolling through TikTok or doomscrolling world news.
But why worry about the future when we aren’t present in the moment? When we might as well just be dead to that moment.
"Many men die at age 25, but aren’t buried until they’re 75."
— Someone said this.
I recently became very aware of this.
I've realized I had been complaining that I don't have time to do all the things I care about, while simultaneously wasting my time with all kinds of things, be it staring numbly at my phone, trying to play a corporate game I don't care about, or generally just being a pain in the ass for my loved ones.
In the grand scheme of the universe, a human life is incredibly short. But from a human's point of view, 80 years is a long time.
But none of this matters if we are unable to be fully present for these 80 years, if we spend all this limited time worrying about things outside of our locus of control.
Most of us want similar things: to have good social and romantic relationships; work on things that fulfill us; care about our bodies and our minds; learn new things; and have fun while doing them.
In essence, what we all want is to matter, to feel safe, to be seen, and to be free.
Being present takes work. You need to remind yourself not to be dead to the moment. But the more you do this, the more effortless it becomes.
And the more effortless it becomes, the less life happens to you and the more you happen to life. And then you are alive to the moment.
And that's what we are all here for.
