It’s not straightforward to be alive. One realizes that it requires a lot of effort to stay alive today, to ensure to keep living tomorrow, and in the near future. Sometimes even some effort and planning is spent to extend lifespan decades forward, as exemplified by some longevity enthusiasts. Entropy will fuck us all up at some point, yet we keep working, yet we keep learning, progressing, achieving, fighting, defiantly. Perchance.
The Gamble of the Better Tomorrow
All of it is a form of a chase. Neuroscientists would (probably) attribute it to a reward mechanism, where the effort is spent towards an abstract reward, which releases dopamine, and strengthens the chase to get the next hit of it. Apparently, in a story old as humanity, this chase is after a “Better Tomorrow”. You work Today so you get paid in the future. Tomorrow is a metaphor of the future in that sense. Every duty, every difficulty, every instance of resistance you encounter you overcome with some Tomorrow in mind. Be it directly or indirectly. Because getting paid Tomorrow will ensure you won’t starve (hopefully), or you’ll be able to cover your rent, so you won’t be evicted.
The core element of the Better Tomorrow is being alive, but this is not enough. We shall not ignore the first part: “Better”. Better than what? Depends. Personally, Better refers to the Today, so I want Tomorrow to be better than Today, as I might be unsatisfied with Today, and find it soothing to escape mentally to the future Tomorrow, where I have a chance of it being Better than the Today I’m experiencing now.
Casino Royale
It’s like a gamble, and we humans do love gambling. That’s what probably made us conquer the planet in the first place. Like imagine being a random bloke 10k years ago, looking at the seemingly endless ocean and thinking “yeah, if I take my tiny piece of wood and some supplies, I might find something out there”. So gambling your (say not so good) Today for the chance of a Better Tomorrow is as appealing to us as ever.
While the example above might not necessarily be telling much about our survival instincts, the gamble we take every day is less risky than our ancestors’ drive for exploration. More often than not we don’t even consider it as a gamble. Take waking up and showing up to do your job as an example. Arguably more risky for you would be not to do that, as it probably will lower the chance for the Tomorrow to actually be Better. But it isn’t always the case, as I hope to convince you with the next example. Say something bad, like really bad happens Tomorrow, and your life turns to shit in a matter of a single day. Wouldn’t you feel better if you spent your Today doing nothing but enjoying it? Wouldn’t it be better to just succumb to the pleasures available Today, knowing that this is the last day when life is “good”? Because, ultimately, you will die, and at some point, you are going to live your last Today, ever. Hopefully it happens later rather than sooner, but it will happen.
So each day you gamble that Tomorrow actually will be better, by working, by working out, by doing your laundry, by engaging in not so fun and pleasant activities like throwing out the trash, so the next day is Better than the alternative, should you skip all of these. And I would argue that there is nothing wrong with trading energy and time Today to improve your life.
But as with everything, one might get lost in this chase. Take my previous blogpost as an example. There, I lined up a system that would help managing your responsibilities and tasks, so that you can do as much as you possibly can, given your finite resources. And if you spend all of your Today’s resources on doing work, what’s left? Tomorrow you wake up, and it’s Today again. So chasing the Better Tomorrow, you once again allocate all of your resources towards doing work, until the Today finishes. And then the Tomorrow becomes Today again. If we had infinite Tomorrows it would not be that gruesome, paradoxically. But since we have a finite amount of them, one might ask: ok, but what if the Better Tomorrow never happens? Because, not surprisingly, it could actually never happen. All the work and effort, all this denial of comfort, recovery, rest, recharge so omnipresent in busy people’s lives, will eventually turn into nothingness, once they die. Once we die.
So what if we trade the other way around? Why not trade the “perfect” Better Tomorrow for a slightly worse Better Tomorrow, and in exchange get a chance of participating (being) in a Good Today? Well, that’s an obvious thing to do, in hindsight. Perfection is a noble goal, but an impossible one. And thus, an imperfect Better Tomorrow is what always actually realizes itself, and you can do nothing about it but accept it. Tomorrow is an abstraction. In reality, it doesn’t even exist. What exists is this very moment, this exact quant of time your current self occupies, with all the complexity of the internal and external world you experience, be it directly or indirectly. Sure, eventually Tomorrow will arrive, but as mentioned before, it would just become Today again.
Trainspotting
So if Tomorrow doesn’t exist, should you do heroin Today? Literature suggests that this is the most pleasant thing a human being can experience, ever. Well, your initial reaction is likely a correct one. No, you should not. But why? If Tomorrow doesn’t exist, then why should you bother? Why work, why grapple with reality, where there is such an appealing alternative of an undescribable pleasure available at hand? I think the answer here is: it doesn’t matter that Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Because your Today’s self is an outcome of all of the prior Todays, and your actions taken there, in the past. Inductively, your Tomorrow’s self is going to be the outcome of your Today’s actions, so you wisely choose not to take a hit of heroin, and hit the gym instead.
It’s likely that your Today’s self is driven by self-preservation and a drive for improvement, for the Better. What is Good, Today, can be not so good for the next Today. That’s why chasing the Better Tomorrow is such a natural thing to do. However, the hidden challenge here is to also focus on making your Today a Good one. Because getting paid is nice, having food in the fridge is nice, having a shelter is nice, success is nice.
Unfortunately, success is usually just a single moment. When you win, it happens for an instant, and then goes away. You cannot win for more than a split second. Once you win, it’s over, the chase is finished. You obviously feel nice about it longer than a split second (I hope), but still, it goes away faster than you’d like. And even if it makes your Today Good, it will usually do it once or twice, and then never again. And the effort put into achieving oftentimes greatly outmatches the reward. Chase doesn’t seem sustainable in that regard, as ultimately there will come the final win, and from that point on, what’s left? There is no Better Tomorrows to chase after, you reached your peak, and now a descent is what awaits you.
The Good Today
So how the fuck do I switch from chase to enjoy? You can enjoy the chase, obviously, but I doubt this is the most enjoyable thing available to you. It’s what makes Today a Good one to be solved, to be understood, and integrated into one’s life to not make the chase eventually feel pointless and empty. Because ultimately you will never live in the imaginary land of the (best) Better Tomorrow, where all is soothingly simple, pleasant, abundant, and perfect. The world is a fucked up place, really, and I know I say it from a position of pretty high privilege, which doesn’t invalidate my claim. Consequently, there will never be a Tomorrow where literally everything is good.
Fixating on the Better, and discarding what’s Good will bring you success, will make you progress, will make you reach high, higher than others, and will burn you to the ground, if you allow for it. Once you achieve a peak, you stop for a second, look around, and find out that this peak ain’t shit; there are others to climb and achieve. One approach is to ignore that finding. Surprise: you can’t. But you can change your perspective.
The Today is a Story
What is this perspective to change then? Let’s start with a bit of reductionism, if you will. Today is a sequence of experiences, a story of sort. Written by the reality imposing itself on you, and your actions that you take, which have consequences. A consequence of eating is (sometimes) satiation, an experience of not feeling hungry anymore. You cannot help, but to experience it. Experience itself is a very general and broad concept I won’t try to fully define here, but on the vibe level you will get it. You experience the tiredness after working out, and a nice biceps pump if the workout was good.
As with all stories, not every part of them is crucial for the plot. Most of them can be safely ignored, and some of them should be paid attention to. An experience is something you can put a name on, that happened for a finite amount of time and has left some mark on you, forever. And most of the experiences are repetitive, dull, and neutral. But they all add up to the story of the Today. So if we are after the Good Today, it has to consist of experiences, which you can classify as Good.
The Experience is About Attention
Diving deeper, an experience is an outcome of all of the sensory inputs that you’ve received when it happened. And there is so much of the raw data we get every second, that it’s impossible to take into account all of them at all times when experiencing, and when (later) assessing the experience.
Here comes what is one of the best things about being human. Filtering the raw data. When you are reading this, you don’t feel the surface that supports you (chair, sofa, etc.), unless I point your attention there (as I did just now). How does it feel? Is it comfortable? Soft? Maybe you need to adjust your posture, you shrimp? Stretch a bit, it’s worth it. Filtering lets you make sense of reality, as without it you will never be able to function. Most of it is done autonomously. When I pointed you to focus on your seat, you just automatically started feeling it. Your attention went somewhere I told it to.
How did it happen? Did you control it to go there? Are you always in control of what you pay attention to? No, you are not. But attention is the mechanism that builds the experience from all of the raw data that comes your way at each moment.
So, if Today is a story of experiences, then the experience is the story told by attention about the raw data.
As trivial as it sounds, but just pay attention to the Good, and all of the sudden life is Good.
Well, it’s more complex than that, but in principle, if you really pay attention to the Good, then your experiences have a chance to be Good, and thus your Today has a chance to be Good. It is really that simple, but at the same time, tough. As I mentioned, the world is a fucked up place. And I’m not advocating that we all close our eyes to the bad stuff and just jump into the abyss of delusion, just to make our Todays Good. Because heroin can also make your Today a Good one, probably the best Good that’s available. But will also significantly lower your chance that future Todays will be Good.
The Switch
So while the chase is really compelling, and for some of us the default mode of existence, there is a value in dropping out from time to time. Just to switch from doing what gives us a higher chance for the Better Tomorrow, to the being with what is Good, Today, right now. And paying attention to the Good is the very mechanism of achieving that.
There are a couple of things you can do to slowly transition to that paradigm. Since the attention is what determines the experience, and thus the Today, one should train it to focus more on the Good. It’s a tall task, but in principle, this is what reliably works. While attention is mostly autonomous, it can be steered consciously. You can focus it on specific things, like the taste of the coffee you drink, or the feeling of relaxation when you chill on the couch.
Attention is also somehow habitual, so you can try developing a new habit. It’s also heavy on the bias. If you hate someone you focus on what’s bad in this person, ignoring possible good aspects. This bias is very human, so don’t beat yourself too much. Since it’s biased, you can try to bias it towards what serves you, by conscious effort, which in time could turn into an unconscious one. Plenty of tools are at hand. You can use the system to literally schedule when you practice paying attention to the Good. As ridiculous as it sounds, it might work for you.
Importantly, don’t try to land on the Moon at the first attempt, aim a bit lower. Maybe enjoy that drink you like a bit more, by paying closer attention to the sensory pleasure you experience when drinking it. Or feel a bit more of that biceps pump you got from curling at the squat rack.
The nice part is that you can make any decent experience a Good one, if you pay attention strategically. Your main nemesis here might be your general busyness, or a million ways you can be distracted by your phone or laptop, kinda robbing you from the full benefits of the otherwise really Good experience, thus making your Today worse.
Perchance.