The hubris of living in the present

We live as if we’ve made it. We act as if we’ve evolved the problems, and now we’re thriving in the midst of the soft comfy solutions we’ve found. But the fact of the matter is we didn’t.

The fact is we’re expendable. Just like our forefathers were, so are we, and probably many a generation to follow, we’re all here to fail and fall for the future that somehow we wrongly believe to have achieved now.

In that future sickness is unknown. In that future for everything consumed there is a cycle to welcome it back. In that future we are not required to provide anything but maintenance of systems that literally care for our well being, helping with anything, from raising our offspring to our eventual and optional stepping into the unknown of death.

It may be that the future is closer than you or I could ever imagine, and it might also be so radical that we just can’t see it, like the legend goes about the Mayans blind to the ships and sails of the conquistadors.

Yet, however humble I might be, I cannot stop from seeing we’re all deluding ourselves. Take bottled water, for example. What do we think happens to the hundreds of PETs we dispose of every week? Do they live a new life as iPhone cases? Surely not. Take food additives and hormones, for another example. What do we think comes out of the unrestrained consumption of food that has been tampered with in more ways than we can imagine? Will we be able to pop a pill and reverse any side effect? Surely not. Take your Uber or instant maid. What do we think we sponsor by ripping the benefits of unregulated labor? Will our comfort and convenience trickle down to uninsured overworked people? Surely not.

Why do we block the facts we know, common sense information, and keep going, like some zombie Duracell rabbit?

Why are we living a life of fake expectations? Why do we let the mirage of convenience hypnotize us into sickness, blandness and the amazing selfishness of forfeiting the future thriving of that greater part of humans called humanity?

Is it because of the pro-aging trance?

the impulsion to leap to embarrassingly unjustified conclusions in order to put the horror of aging out of one’s mind (s)

Maybe.

I think it is because we’re all living in the present. Sorry Eckhart. The present is fleeting, the past is hardly helping. The future is all we have, and we just won’t look at it. We live for tomorrow, as if it is today. And, the funnier part, the present doesn’t even exist. Literally, there is no present for a conscious being.

Living in the present makes for H&M. Living in the future makes for Patagonia. Think of this, everything you buy today makes another future day worse. Every. Thing. Our system is currently built for growth. This is not bad in itself, but it is simply a system too accessible and unsustainable. Stifle growth by having a simpler present and enjoy the richer future you’ve just created.

Let’s be more humble. Let’s teach others to be more humble. But not humble in general, humble about one single thing: we’re all dying. We’re not eternal and in a short amount of time we’ll be wiped off as if we’ve never existed. The humility of living in the future, but not any future, that far future where we, we the ones alive today, we’ll be stardust again, well that might be building inside ourselves that miraculous mobilization to stop this madness of a world, a world pinned to the ground by military firepower and with one wing chopped off by humans who mistake wealth for worth and the other wing ripped out by sociopaths disguised as leaders.

We can do it. Just breathe.