The Problem of NOW: How Focusing on NOW Can Ruin Your Future

Over the last decade, we’ve been mesmerized and sold on another bright and shiny idea: focusing on the Now! This moment. This split second. If you’ve done this to any significant degree, you probably realized you were no longer thinking about your own future...or any future at all. Just focusing on being here, and trying to catch a wet Now slipping out of your hands like a slimy fish out of water. For those of you who have never read about how to focus on the Now: it’s like smoking a whole lot of marijuana, except there's no laughter.

It can be difficult, this business of “being present”, because Now doesn’t really exist! You want to talk about Time? At first thought, keeping time makes sense for us because of earth’s uniquely ordered environment--past to present, cause and effect--, its movement, and its relationship with the rest of the universe. However, there’s no limit to how incredibly small a single second of time can be broken down. German scientists recently measured the world's smallest unit of time, called the zeptosecond. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second-- a trillionth of a billionth of a second! The shortest time span ever recorded, a zeptosecond is the time it takes for a photon to cross a hydrogen molecule, or around 247 zeptoseconds. 

At the quantum level, durations are so short, they can’t even be divided into time. Instead, we have processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, which allow us to calculate possibilities and relations, and form laws. Time is not only an abstract human concept, it can be argued that it’s even an individual experience. 

By the time I took note of how much money was being spent on books, seminars, and videos teaching Americans about the banal subject of Now, I decided to spend a full year focusing on what Now meant and “living in the moment”, as they say. I watched all the videos with catchy phrases like “there is nothing but Now!” I even called my mom and told her that “I’m now living in the Now mom--you can still call me on the same number though.”

It’s true that the concept of time is purely man-made: a construct that helps us understand, communicate, and make sense of pretty much everything in our existence. The universe has no concept of time, but still allowed us to create and use it nonetheless. The chronology of time is a story we use to make sense of our continuity. So what is all this commotion about Now really about? The teaching is meant to bring your attention to the present and reduce the amount of attention you spend on past or future events. Reducing thought of past times has some terrific benefits because the past is where regret and blame live. We constantly tell ourselves “if only I had done things differently” or “I didn’t have any luck back then” or “why did that happen to me?”

The past can be useful to learn how one got where they did--to repeat the good behaviors and avoid the bad--, to make sense of our experience, to appreciate what we’ve been through and recreate the good feelings we had. But even that turns into a bad thing if too much time is spent reminiscing about the past and not making the most of the present time. The worst part of the past is when we use it to dwell on our own mistakes, and how we got more than our fair share of bad luck.

The same negative effect pertains to the idea of one’s future. It’s called “wishful thinking”. Freud introduced the concept as one of two fundamental ways humans go about fulfilling their desires: one involves working with the constraints of reality, and the other, wish fulfillment, involves ignoring or denying constraints that are incompatible with our desires. Most of us are guilty of a mildly positive daydreaming: a visualization of a future state where our goals are achieved and dreams realized. But this goal-oriented thinking has an evil twin: it’s called fantasizing. Thoughts of fantasy are so far removed from reality, and the person lost in these fantastic thoughts knows there is no way to get there.

The simple message, the free message, one not for sale wrapped in cellophane or included with an expensive ticket, is “get out of your mind” and “focus on what’s real and right in front of you.” But of course, we tend to overlook wise advice like this in favor of expensive programs with pretentious actors aided by soundtracks.

What can’t be ignored, what must not be ignored, especially in our expensive, fast-moving and advanced lifestyle, is that Now must be coupled with a realistic and healthy dosage of the Future. Mental images, messages, and stories breathe life into our future goals. If you have no idea what you want, it’s anyone’s bet how you’re going to fare. Some people have figured their way out of any meaning in life. But for the rest of us, we have to live and create our own meaning in the real world. Forget the future at your own peril!

If you liked this article, share it with your contacts! Browse and read more articles written by Henry Jawhary: