When and What is Now?

Hi. You are here. Not in the past, not in the future, but here. The present. Welcome. We sometimes call this "now".

“Now” is where your life happens. It’s the only time you can act, make choices, and experience the world.

The human brain is a bit like a camera, constantly snapping photos of now and then storing them as memories. Your brain is always a tiny bit behind reality because it takes a moment to process what’s happening. So, what you think of as the now is actually a fraction of a second old.

Ugh. So sneaky now.

That's ok though. Now is still now as far as we're concerned.

Everyone is moving one second per second into the future. As a species, everyone is sharing the collective tangent of now.

Ok, that's what now is, but how much do we value it?

The late great cognitive scientist, Daniel Kahneman, asked a brilliant question:
Suppose you’re planning a vacation, but are told at the vacation’s conclusion, that you’ll get an amnesic drug which will wipe away your memories of the experience. Your photos would also be destroyed. Would you still take the vacation?"

He found that most people would choose not to.

Kahneman made the distinction between what he called "the experiencing self" vs. "the remembering self". The experiencing self is the “you” that goes about life, experiencing the day-to-day in the present.

Occasionally, you form a memory/story about a past experience – this is the remembering self - the self that evaluates life.

In our memories, time doesn’t matter in the slightest. Our decisions and actions are governed by our memories of an experience, not the experience itself.

It turns out, we go on vacations, in large part, to construct memories, not to have experiences.

People primarily value the story they tell about an experience over the experience itself.

We use now as a means to an end to get to the memory. Poor now :(

You don't need to look further than a concert or the final minutes of a close sporting event. We all face this strange choice. Do I pull out my cell phone and record this moment and watch it through a screen? Or, do I fully experience the present moment, screen and shoulder-pain free?

So what do we do? We are in the present, but each of us is also just a story via our collection of memories processed through now.

Recording highlights of the concert is just fine. I definitely do it and playing them back years later makes me smile. Just as childhood videos of my family from my parents' 10lb Sony 8mm brick of a camera. I would argue we are still in the now in these situations, and videos, love or hate them, can sometimes help us form more accurate memories.

The issue is when we're not present, and miss out on memory encoding because we're distracted by other thoughts, feelings, things we need to do in the future, or a buzz on our phone that makes us miss a moment. When that happens, now AND our memories can get hi-jacked.

Social media perpetuates this even further. Not only are you thinking about how you want to remember now but also how you want others to remember your now. This can often distract us as well.

Of course, it's impossible to be present for everything, but the more mindful we can be about being intentional with now, the more rewarding life can become.

The Last Time Paradox

Every single moment in your life is a “last time” for something. The last time you watch your team win a championship, visit your childhood home, have a heart-to-heart conversation with a certain close friend, taste that exact bite of your favourite food, listen to a song, or hug a parent. It’s both kind of mind-blowing and a little bit terrifying.

But here’s the thing: we almost never recognize these moments as the “last time” while they’re happening. We just merrily go about our days, assuming we’ll have more chances to experience everything again. But that’s not how life works. Each moment is unique, and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

So, what do we do with this realization? Do we panic and try to seize every single moment like a frantic squirrel hoarding acorns for winter? No, that would be exhausting and probably counterproductive. Instead, we can gently remind ourselves to treat each experience with a little more reverence. Not in a grim, doomsday-prepping way, but in a way that honors the fleeting, precious nature of life.

If we approached every conversation, every sunset, every mundane task with the awareness that it could be the last time we experience it. Maybe we’d listen a bit more intently, savor the colors a bit more deeply, and find a bit more joy in the ordinary.

Life is a series of “last times” strung together. Each one is a tiny goodbye to that particular version of now.

The Finiteness of Life Makes Now More Delicious

Our finitude of time - the finitude of now - the fact that you have to miss out, isn't something to regret, it's the thing that makes life juicy in the first place.

Sam Harris states on his Waking Up Podcast #289, "There's something arrogant and entitled in the way we think about our finite time. We act as if it's a huge problem we only get a short amount of time and it's an insult it gets taken away from us by death. But when we say that our lives are short, short compared to what? A hypothetical immortal being? No, we should compare our time to all the countless hypothetical people who never got to be born in the first place. From that perspective, it's not really cruel that our lives aren't longer, rather it's a staggering, stupendous bonus that we get any time as conscious creatures at all. It starts to make more sense to think of those inexhaustible experiences the world has to offer, not existing on some endless to-do list, that if you don't make it through the list you've missed out on life, but more like a different kind of list - a menu - a list of options you get to choose from. The necessity of choosing is not a terrible fate you've been sentenced to, but rather a wonderful opportunity, and a positive affirmation of whatever choices you do end up making. In this state of mind, you can relish the peak experiences of your life, but you can also find deep meaning in the other experiences too - in the chores, in the duties, in the myriad ways we just need to maintain our daily lives. You can embrace the fact that you're foregoing certain pleasures/experiences because whatever you decide to do with your time instead today - to earn money, to make art, to bath your toddler, to pause on a trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk - that's how you've chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect."

Damn Sam, you're good. The mere fact that we get to experience anything at all is a staggering, stupendous bonus. Our finite time isn’t a curse, it’s a gift. It’s what makes every now precious.

(Imagine treating every mundane task with the same reverence we reserve for life’s peak moments. Washing dishes? It’s a meditative dance with soapy water. Stuck in traffic? It’s a chance to listen to your favorite podcast or simply observe the world around you.)

There is no destination, there is only now. Now IS the journey.

I chuckle when a movie or story ends with, "and they lived happily ever after". We're taught a "when-I-finally" mindset that leads people to believe they will only be happy once certain goals are achieved, but this approach perpetuates a cycle of postponing fulfillment. "Happily ever after" is not a real place. Now is the only place.

Computational biologist professor at MIT, Manolis Kellis, on the Lex Fridman Podcast #123, while talking about happiness, states, "The journey is what matters. Life will not start after the last milestone. Life has already started a long time ago. What you're experiencing now IS life. This is it. It's not some future thing you work yourself hard to get to and then you live 'happily ever after'. The happily ever after is the end of the story. Nothing happens after that. We need to teach society that it's not just about the happy ending. Our kids are brainwashed into expecting that things will be happy and rosy. And it's ok if its not. And they should keep struggling, because the struggle is the journey. And the journey IS the meaning of life."

Plot twist: Is now the meaning of life? 🧐

Now will never always be perfect and happy. We wouldn't want it that way. When now is unpleasant and we want to "escape" it, we can make important changes to our lives. Through discomfort, we grow, we change, we create, and we find meaning. This is the power of the human condition - the beautiful struggle.

A wonderful quote by Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, appears at the ending of a favourite film of mine, Jo Jo Rabbit (Watch it. It is cute, funny, sad and terrifying all at once).

“Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.”

Now is our short break from not existing. Four thousand weeks if we’re lucky. Pause, take a breath, and look around. Feel the texture of your life - the smooth and the rough. Laugh at the absurdity of it all and cry when it moves you. Share your moments, but don’t forget to live them first.

Welcome to now. You're not alone. We're all here together if we want to be.