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Living In Your Future's Past

When I was younger I often longed for the willpower to live as though I was a character in a game you could control. A Sims person, directed by my higher desires. I did not play enough video games to realize it is often an unfun task to play optimally or to grind out plausible preparatory tasks.

Or I imagined I could be informed by a desire outside myself, to live as though I was controlled by the future self who would inherit the consequences of my actions.

This is a very difficult way to live. It has many benefits, but you must acknowledge a simple truth: you are not merely living in your future's past. You are living, right here, right now, and that person deserves just as much consideration as anyone.

I feel I'm in a liminal space. Not yet to a part of my life where it would have much instrinsic value at all. But I can help people, I can do my work well, I can give to charity, I can be kind to others. I can try to point people to higher purpose.

But my desires will not be fulfilled in the foreseeable future (who can foresee all that much, really), and my experiences are not very good. I hope they will be. But that's not where I am. I wish I had a family, a wife I could dedicate myself to, but I understand how my imagining of someone who would hear of a brilliant young professional man who gave everything away to help others and not merely avoid being repelled by it, but find it a matter of urgency to attach herself eternally... while I feel that way about whoever she is, I've not found her. I wish I had a spiritual community that understood me.

So this all raises an obvious question: what do you do when the future is all you have, because the present isn't nearly enough? Who are you when you don't want to live in the moment, and the duty to be your future's past is all you have? Who are you then?

My answer is to merely adjust what I'm looking for in a moment. I do live there, after all.

I think I'm going to go to bed earlier. Wake up earlier. Spend more time on strange activities that are somewhat hard to focus on. Sleep more. Exercise more. Study more. Pray more. But not just that.

I also want to try and understand what it means to live a simple life. A life without excitement or distraction or engagement. To understand why that might be valuable, too, and not a source of dread.