I have a decent self esteem when I look at my personal attributes and potential, and a devastating sense of loss when I look at my level of accomplishment. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the decisions I've made in my past and how my life would have turned out differently. I run countless scenarios in my head about how things would have gone if I had just done this or not done that. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how I will be different in the future, when my circumstances change. I will be able to get my life going when thing X in my life is gone or when thing Y comes along. I run the simulations in my head and prepare for those days and those decisions.
And then..... then I sit back and look at what those two things have in common. What do different choices in the past and preparing for hypotheticals in the future have in common that lets them be such a huge difference between boundless success and obscure mediocrity? Neither of them happens now. They are the past and the future and have little to do with my choices today. They are somehow special and different than the drudgery of the common moment I live in.
It seems that I have tremendous power over life at any time other than today. I can have amazing influence on my own life and others when I'm not here, not now. At least that's how I perceive it, and if you really think about it, it's total nonsense. All that exists is now. The past was just a different now you made mediocre choices in and the future will feel no different than today, because it will just be another unremarkable today when it arrives.
You notice the same pattern in thinking in all people about all things- not just personal issues. Some people look to the past as a glittering paradise lost to us somehow and at risk of slipping away forever. Others lament being born in this time and would give anything to see the wonders of the future. Both the past and the future (whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about them) seem infinitely more exciting and powerful. But if we are rational, if we are realistic, we must begrudgingly acknowledge that neither conception is likely to be true. When we dig around the past we find cracks in the facade and if we examine a single moment of history as we would examine a current moment (without the benefit of hindsight), it is just as jumbled and can feel just as stagnant as the now.
And if we look at the future realistically? No matter what set of ideas become the new norm, no matter what progress is made, human nature will remain much the same. We may become better or worse as a whole but if we're being truly honest with ourselves, the overall condition of humanity is not what gets in the way of our personal progress in the now. We are frustrated because everything is so damn complicated and everything and everyone seems to be going a thousand different directions and will not cooperate with the goals we are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, there will always be a huge diversity of ideas and conflicting goals. Humans are, above all, social creatures and we will always be doomed to the frustrations of our mutual dependence on each other - these strange creatures that have their own minds and feelings and desires that are too complex to fit neatly together. If they did, if our minds became so similar, our goals so one directional, and our feelings so uniform that cooperation was not supremely frustrating then we would have lost much of our value as a species. If either humanity or the world becomes simple enough to fit into the concerns and goals of one person then we are totally screwed.
The world will always be bigger than us and too complex for everyone to focus on what we are focused on. Life will never be simple enough for everyone to be concerned with only a small agreed on set of goals or to fit their differing priorities neatly together. I don't say this out of pessimism. It is just an acknowledgement of a trick our brain plays on us constantly. In everything from movies to the state of society our brains are almost designed for past and future idealization and frustration with the present. The reason for this is the following perception:
The problem with that perception?
The problem is, in many ways, the human brain has only one scale and we stretch or compress things to fit it. We perceive the now, the past, and the future to be things that can be compared side by side. The problem is that even if you are only looking at a tiny portion of the past it is still HUGE. The same goes for the future. The present is an amazingly finite thing, but it also everything that currently exists. The past and the future are enormous and composed of many many presents. Our brain is not good at perceiving things on scales so large and so small so it just picks a size. As we stand back to look at another time and take in the whole picture the detail is lost. The details and "irrelevant" data that fills any current moment blend together into something much simpler and grand.
When we look at the big picture of the past, or our vision of the future we see something epic and exciting. Something full of meaning. What we see when we look at the present is an endless sea of meaningless details. I becomes easy to idealize the past and future. And then we can imagine that our impact on either would be greater than anything we could do in the stagnant chaos around us now.
Even when looking at something so small as our own lifespan we do this. We see our youth as a whole, comparable to our present, but holding much more power over our life. Even our own past is composed of many many 'current' moments and it is rare that any one of them really had more power than the one we inhabit now. Of course that one moment could have changed the course of events and lead to a vastly different present, but we tend to think of JUST that moment and not all of the ones after it we would have had to make different choices. To make different choices now and in the next 'now' and the next would add up to just as much influence. We can't take back the past but our control on our present is no weaker than it was in the past and it won't get any stronger in the future.
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