gavinwielandsblog

[gavinwielandsblog]

On Living in the Moment

I get the aviator-nation-yoga-matt-mom dread whenever I hear someone non-ironically tell me about how they are living (or working on living) in the moment. But from a philosophical perspective, I have to admit, this whole the present thing is a little fucking weird. 

If you have been systemically manufactured into thinking about history in the (problematic) western-hegelian-linear-line type of way like me, and you take some time to reflect (or smoke something), you might conclude that (as you pretend to do your homework in the library and are, instead, planning tomorrow morning's coffee shop [where you plan to see your crush] outfit) you and the rest of the people on the planet and in the library are actually on the precipice of space-time itself hurdling at the speed of time into the next infinitely short present moment. But I took calculus and you probably did too and, like you (unless you’re a math major), I don’t remember much. What I do remember though is if something is infinitely small, like the moments in time during the present, it just collapses into zero. So I guess I’m thinking that the aviator-nation-live-laugh-love-mom person actually can not, no matter how hard they try, live in the moment. The moment is just too damn short to live in. I guess an alternative might be that we live slightly behind the moment. Like the moment happens and then we react and process and, while all that’s happening, all of humanity is already hurdling through an infinity of new moments. 

The funny thing is though, none of the shit in that previous paragraph actually matters. If you’re convinced that the present doesn’t exist and we’re all just living slightly behind the moment you’re literally not going to change a single thing in your life. It’s basically just some bullshit semantics at the end of the day. Fuck it, I’m blaming it on my hyper-western education and Hegel. 

So, what if we disregard the whole straight-line history thing? How can we think about the present as something besides the ever-speedy perpendicular dividing history and future?

Well, I really hate to do it but I think we might have to look at this thing from the aviator-nation-shaka person perspective for a bit. When someone says they are living in the moment, they’re pretty much never talking about metaphysics. Even though you can kind of intuitively get the gist, it’s honestly quite hard to spell out what they really mean, unless they tell you. They might mean that they are trying to be more mindful of their current state of affairs. Or, they might mean that they are trying to emotionally jettison some fuck-shit that happened to them in the past, or some fuck-shit that they are anticipating in the future. Or, they might mean that they are trying to practice (often platitudinal) gratitude. Or, it might mean that they are (to obviously no avail) trying to slow (or stop) the only thing in the universe that never changes, change. 

Regardless of their implicit intentions, I think the multiplicity of meanings imbued in living in the moment should be enough to show it’s pretty damn trite. Sometimes, moment livers do give context though, so this isn’t always a problem. Regardless, the thing that sucks is that it actually seems to work for people. I mean, I wouldn’t be writing about this unless a fuck-ton of people had normatively embodied this shit. It begs the question: am I just a judgemental-academic-epistemic-hubris-dickhead or is this living in the moment shit whack?

I just re-read what I’ve written so far and it’s pretty clear that I am, in fact, a judgemental-academic-epistemic-hubris-dickhead, but I don’t think the two options posited above are mutually exclusive. Now, call me paranoid, but I think that those who explicitly tell others that they are living in the moment are actually implicitly weaponizing the practice in a sort of spiritual-superiority-complex. What I’m trying to say is: part of the reason living in the moment works for people is not just because of the actual introspective spiritual/emotional work, but because they are telling people that they are doing introspective spiritual/emotional work. This is not to say that people don’t actually do any of the cognitive gymnastics that might constitute their subjective working definition of living in the moment. I’m not trying to call them liars. I really just want to say that whether or not their reasons for performing these cognitive gymnastics in the first place are outward-facing, telling others is always (salient or not) implicitly intended to positively influence the way others see them. Whether others actually see them in a more positive light or not, the underlying (again, salient or not) expectation of their increased social (spiritual?) capital is enough for the practice, in part, to work for them. I see this as the spiritual-superiority-complex (SSC). 

And now there’s a problem. Intrinsically, it seems like living in the moment is a good thing. But, if you live in the moment and you tell other people about it, whether you like it or not, you are exercising the SSC. 

But is the SSC even a bad thing? Is it generally bad to say things that are implicitly intended to positively influence the way others see you? Well, we obviously say good things about ourselves all the time, so that’s not an issue. The problem with the SSC is in those cases where those outward-facing reasons are stronger than the inner facing ones. Cases where the liver lives because they want to improve the way others think about them, instead of improving themselves. What really sucks is that the livee has no way of knowing what the liver’s reasons are and, if the livee is emotionally immature like me, they’re going to assume the worst. 

This pretty much perfectly brings me to my conclusion: grind in silence. Stop telling other people that you are working on living in the moment and just fucking do it. Or, be like me and live in your relatively chill trauma. Okay Google, play Easter in Miami by Kodak Black.