The Unsettling Side of Living in the Here and Now

Living in the eternal present led me to an existential crisis.

I don’t write. I fish. (Or at least I try to.)

I try to fish the pieces of my soul out of the dirty river that is my life.

Today, I caught a big one (A theory)

Let’s dive

The problem of always being here and now.

Today, a voice inside my head asked me, “Why did you make that mistake years ago?”

Another voice replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t stopped to think about it.”

And that’s the problem: we don’t stop to think.

Everything is going faster and faster.

Stopping to think and analyze what happened is labeled “Unproductive.”

Thinking about the past is a thing of the past.

Today, we have to live in the now.

As this article’s cover metaphorically shows, burning the past and the future.

And, of course, we make mistakes.

But no matter what, every time we screw up, we put all our problems and bad experiences in the refrigerator of the mind (the subconscious), and we go on with our life.

But just like in your real fridge, the leftovers you don’t throw away rot.

That’s why life stinks: too many leftovers in our mind’s fridge, generating fungus and stinking rotten in Tuppers.

It is one of the collateral damages of living in the present ALL THE TIME :-)

The power of now can disempower you.

We need time to look back and reflect on what’s going on: stop accumulating leftovers and throw them away before they stink.

But we are so obsessed with living in the present that we lose the capacity for self-introspection: to recycle the crap :-)

Even when we meditate, we don’t reflect.

Today’s meditation seeks to leave the mind blank and, when thoughts come, not to get attached to them but to let them go.

But they don’t go away.

They stay in the subconscious, stinking at the bottom of the fridge.

Note: All those thoughts act like computer programs in the background, which you don’t realize but steal your cache memory (energy) and condition your conscious decisions.

Living in the now all the time makes us superficial.

By not taking time to analyze our life stories, we live fragmented lives, which fragment our minds.

Modern life is becoming increasingly like the TikTok feed: a bunch of moments without context, where we tend to skip the boring ones to get to the fun ones as soon as possible to get our dopamine rush.

And that’s lowering our IQ (at least for me).

Because jumping from one thing to another constantly in an infinite present without going deep into the roots of what we just experienced prevents us from understanding anything deeply.

And it makes us lead a superficial life because we only have superficial thoughts.

We need to process the past to maintain our identity and purpose.

We need to think about the past.

We need to understand our lives.

We need to tell our own story.

Gabriel García Marquéz once wrote, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers to tell it.”

We need to look at the past, or rather “edit” it, to connect the dots and create a narrative that allows us to be.

Otherwise, our identity becomes liquid, formless, chaotic.

And from there, losing a sense of life and purpose is a small step.

I’ve been there.

Takeaway

The problem with the power of now is that if you spend too much time in the now, you end up having a GIANT existential crisis, or at least it has happened to me.

You have to live in the now, YES.

But you must give space and time to analyze the past and even experience nostalgia to empty your mental refrigerator (the subconscious) of rotten leftovers.

Or else life will suck.

Bonus

Do you know why it is good to reread good books again and again?

Because the information in the book hasn’t changed, but YOU HAVE.

The moral of these is that your current self needs to review the past information to integrate what you overlooked.

The past is never past; it is always new.

Every time you review your past, the past has something new to teach you.

A virtual hug

AG

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