Worrying about the future distracts us from enjoying the present moment

In my previous post, “Not-knowing is wise, because we know so much less than what we think we know,” I said:

But it seems to me that a major source of my customary feeling of knowing what’s going on in my life comes from self-talk derived from a basic assumption that what I think will happen, actually will happen.

Meaning, I wake up, envision what is on the day’s to-do list, and have a comforting feeling that I know how things are going to happen today. Problem is, that rarely happens. There’s always surprises. Something else comes up. I change my mind. An unexpected phone call, email, or whatever pushes me in a different direction.

I’m terrible at predicting what is going to happen. But I constantly tell myself, “This is what’s going to happen.”

My worries about the future are similar. I’m continually visualizing bad things that could happen to me, to my wife, to our dog, to our house, to our city, to our state, to our nation, to the world. Cancer. Disability. Earthquake. War. Financial collapse. Climate catastrophe. To name but a few.

Of course, some worrying is a good thing. If I didn’t worry about my car breaking down, I wouldn’t get the recommended maintenance done. If I didn’t worry about a heart attack, I wouldn’t be so careful about exercising, eating right, and getting an annual checkup.

But I often take worrying to an undesirable extreme. As I said in the previous post, I’m terrible at predicting what is going to happen. Or how I’ll feel about what happens, even if I’ve predicted it correctly.

When I worked in health planning and policy analysis, which at one point entailed being the executive director of a bioethics organization, I recall an interesting study that asked people how they’d feel if they had a serious spinal cord injury and lost the use of their arms and legs, becoming quadriplegic. Many, if not most, said that life wouldn’t be worth living.

However, when actual quadriplegics were asked if they were pleased with life, the answer was overwhelmingly “yes.” Which shows that often we’re terrible at predicting how we’ll feel if such-and-such occurs.

Thus this advice from Robert Saltzman in his book, Depending on no-thing, makes sense to me, even if I’m not able to follow that advice much of the time. It’s in the form of a response to someone who asked a question about transporting their attention from the future to the present.

There is no future. What you are calling “future” is imaginary. Not somewhat imaginary, but totally and completely imaginary. You may stop breathing in the very next moment, and if that were to happen — as one day it will, since everything alive must die — every bit of your fantasized future would have been entirely non-existent. This is obvious and undeniable. What, you might ask yourself, stops you from accepting the truth of it right now?

I don’t know how to help you see that, from my perspective, what you are calling “future” is constructed entirely of your own anxieties, replayed again and again like a low-grade horror movie. You see that or you don’t. If you see it, then you are able to say:

Wow! All that grief about what bad things might or could happen is just a story I keep telling myself. Actually I have no idea what will happen, or how I will feel even in the very next moment, to say nothing about the fantasized far away future. So obsession with possible catastrophe is just a form of mental masturbation that distracts me from the only life I really have, or ever will have, which is here and now.

A few pages further on Saltzman says:

There’s nothing wrong in imagining a future, as long as the images remain on the practical level where they can function, as you say, to further survival. That, after all, is how DNA-encoded traits evolve and persist in the genome: if they serve survival, the bodies that bear them live long enough to reproduce them sexually.

Now, if I plant some beans and tend to the young shoots with weeding and watering, I may do it because I imagine a future in which I harvest beans and eat them to survive. Most likely, that imagining of the future was strengthened with the shift from a hunter-gatherer culture to agriculture; and presently to money-culture, in which present actions may bear financial dividends. So, if my imagining helps the beans to flourish, and I get to eat them later, mazel tov. [congratulations]

A problem arises when the useful faculty of imagining the future jumps the shark, and rather than being used to further material goals — for which it may have some utility — instead purports to predict what I might think or how I might feel at some supposed future time. Only when the so-called future remains psychologically unknown and blowing in the wind, as Bob Dylan put it, does one enjoy the freedom to experience in its fullness and unrepeatable essence whatever comprises this moment.

This is what artists and lovers know in their bones.