Category Archives: Writing

I work in the insurance industry, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Not only of the potentially expensive contracts we’re writing, but also the future of the company itself and how to build for growth, robustness, and improving the world (that last part is more for me than for the investors). Sometimes, after a long week of working on making the future a more attractive home that my company (and as a result in part me too) will own significant equity in, I slip into meta thoughts about time and where one places one’s investments. Most people would say, “obviously the future”. It wouldn’t be an investment if there wasn’t an expectation of a day beyond when that which was put in results in something worth rather more (ideally with compound interest). But rather than put my eggs into Einstein’s ‘most powerful force in the universe’ basket, I’m rather more attracted to making an omelet right now. I can’t live in the future, it’s a myth. The future doesn’t exist. It never exists. It will never exist. It’s a heuristic that is meant to make our lives seem a little bit more like chronologies, even though they are actually a continuous shot that’s not recording and has a blank screenplay, one moment that is always right now. So even if I have lots of contracts that ensure that if I’m ever living in the moment-arrangement in which I experience a catastrophic financial loss, I’ll only have a mythical relationship to those losses until the moment shifts, the loss is the name of the moment, and the moment is not as intense because the loss is paid by someone else. Certainly better than a moment-scape that doesn’t include support, but the fictional future isn’t ever a problem, because again, it doesn’t exist. Confused? I definitely am. How much am I a planning being vs. a being being? What do I owe to myself a week from now? A year from now? A decade from now? Do I owe that self a healthy body, bank account, and income stream? Or do I only exist as a self in the present moment, and the strange kaleidoscopes and mirrors that are leading me to imagine a version of me in the future are unhelpful and nonsensical? What if I were to erase the notion of a self and just be a body? The brain is part of that body, so no need for a distinction between mind. A body with no self. What if that body had no future, as well as no self or mind? The body (me, but not a self) would make decisions as responses to the moment, but they would only look like decisions to a historian. The body would act in ways that met the conditions of a given moment collage (again, time is only a continuous rearranging of the scene, not a progression of scenes). Essentially doing the yogic pose that the environment and the body itself shout out. Rather than attempting to control or own acreage of the future, the body would seek an arrangement among the environment that works in the moment-collage, with no thought for what arrangement might come next, no attachment to arrangements past. The moment arrangement might even include paying for an insurance contract. But it certainly wouldn’t include thinking about possible future arrangements or their implications for a clearly nonsensical identity. Though it also couldn’t include any certainty (or, as follows, any sustained valuations). Maybe this is already our situation (certainly the case if the free will deniers are correct). Even if there is free will, though, might it be wisest to stop trying to gain power over a mythical tomorrow? Owning the present is the highest rated thing.