Our Fear of the Future
Seizing this moment in time
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme. This month we’re exploring fear.
This Week at a Glance:
This week we finish our examination of fear with our fascination of fearing the future. The future is written into nearly everything we do from grocery shopping to saving for retirement. But it also takes us from the present and causes constant anxiety.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 Why we fear the future and what that does to us;
🍬 How you can learn to return to the present;
🍫 Why the present moment now only is good for you but for future generations.
There is something that continuously looms over us and as hard as we try to fight it, we’re always keeping an eye on it, and that’s the future.
We’re constantly told we need to save for retirement, we want to ensure we’re getting a paycheck next week, we look to a potentially more positive time than now.
The future always looms very close to us, always scratching at the door, always looking for ways to remind us of what it will be.
And the ultimate future, the one Ernest Becker wrote so eloquently about, was the end. The fear of death, the impact that had on us, and the narratives we write in the present to handle that dreadful feeling.
The future always lingers over us, it is impossible for it not to. We spent hundreds of thousands of years working to survive not just today but tomorrow. But the risks of yesterday are not the same of today. While the end may be the same, the challenges are greatly exceeded.
We worry about our children and the life they will have, we worry about our health and the lives we’ll have, we worry about the planet, about government, about our friends and family, about our jobs. We’re always in one way of another looking to the future, and, according to Becker, holding a vision of our own mortality deep in the recesses of our mind.
But we need to avoid this, or at least that’s what we tell ourselves. So we distract ourselves with what the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn calls “intoxications”—television, social media, drinking and games, all things that we enjoy, yes, but all things that distract us from our fear of the future.
We’re so caught up in ourselves yet we refuse to look at the truth of life and its constant need for succession. Everything we have today is built from those that came before us. And just like the past, we too are paving the future for the next generation.
Or, as Hahn states, we’re all like the plum tree.
“In each plum on the tree there is a pit. That pit contains the plum tree and all previous generations of plum tree. The plum pit contains an infinite number of plum trees.”
A plum doesn’t just know how to be a plum. It doesn’t just know how to ripen when it needs to. A plum knows, through thousands of years and iterations, how to exist in the world, and how to pass on its knowledge to the next generation.
”Inside the pit is an intelligence, a wisdom that knows how to become a plum tree, how to produce branches, leaves, flowers, and plums. It cannot do this on its own. It can do this only because it has received the experience and adaptations of so many generations of ancestors.”
We too experience the same life as the plum. We inherit the knowledge and intelligence of the previous generation. We have “an eternity of wisdom” from all that came before us. And we ourselves will leave a line of wisdom for the next generations.
“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” wrote Becker, “it is a mainspring of human activity-activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man."
And that may be true, the future sure is written with the same ending. But at the same time, we can reject this notion of death and fear of the future by remembering what exists in the current moment, for it is in this moment—the present—that everything exists.
Yes, the future will come, and with it endless possibilities. But it is right now that we hold closest to us. If we can relinquish our agony of the past, and suspend our outlook on the future, we can better be here, in the present. And it is through the present that we learn to relinquish the fear of the future. Because it is through our actions in the present that we get there. That we build our wisdom for the next generation. That the plum seed learns new tricks about life. It is in this moment right now that we write the future.
As the Buddha once said, "The past no longer is, the future is not yet here; there is only one moment in which life is available, and that is the present moment."
Seize the present moment.
Relinquish the fear of the future.
And in turn, one will learn to write what the future will hold.
3-Bullet Summary:
The future always looms over us, reminding us to look ahead. This forward looking outlook is built into everything we do from grocery shopping to saving for retirement.
But with a constant state of the future on hand, we cannot be in the present. Ernest Becker wrote that it is this fear of the future, and our response to it, that we spend our time writing stories to distract ourselves of death.
By remembering that what we do will have reverberations on generations to come, we can return to the present moment, reminding ourselves that we need to be focused on the here and now so we can properly build our wisdom for future generations to take advantage of.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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