You’re existing right now.

You’re breathing. You’re reading these words. Isn’t that amazing?

What more could you possibly want in this moment than to be alive on Earth, being fed with more seconds, minutes and hours to use however you want?

Most of us take our current existence for granted. We often dwell on the past or drift off into the future, without being grateful for the gift of life we have right now. Most of us don’t exist in the present moment.

That isn’t some grand concept.

Being present is simply about being fully immersed in whatever’s happening to you right now by forgetting about the past and the future. Neither of those things really exist if you think about it. Do you know anyone who’s visited the past or future before? No, you don’t.

You only ever exist right now.

The current moment is riddled with problems we’d rather not confront. That’s why as a society, we default to spending much of our time in the future, in ways we don’t realise. However, living in the future is a recipe for unhappiness and a meaningless life.

Here are two ideas to think about to stop living in the future and start living right now, where you belong:

You have to eat the marshmallow.

One way we live in the future is by delaying gratification.

This is when you do something difficult now so your future self will be rewarded. That could mean doing a tough workout now so your future self will be stronger or resisting junk food now so your future self will feel more energised.

You may be able to see where I’m going with this.

There’s nothing wrong with delaying gratification. I think it’s important myself. Without it, your life would be ruled by cheap pleasures. The danger with it though is that it can cause you to adopt the mindset of only doing things now if they benefit your future self in a direct way. You can forget that your present self even exists at all.

To illustrate my point, I’ll use the example of the famous marshmallow experiment carried out by the Stanford professor, Walter Mischel.

Mischel and his colleagues brought hundreds of young children individually into a room and gave each of them one marshmallow. If the children could resist eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes, they would be rewarded with another one. If they ate it, they got nothing. Those who had the discipline to resist eating the marshmallow (who delayed gratification) had better later life outcomes than those who didn’t.

A lot of us are carrying out our own marshmallow experiment, but for life.

The point of delaying gratification is to have an easier future. The reality is that when that future comes when we’re meant to be rewarded, we just continue to delay gratification. We never enjoy the present moment since all our actions only serve our future self. We’re accumulating more metaphorical marshmallows for nothing.

The author Oliver Burkeman wrote in his book Meditations for Mortals:

…there’s no virtue in accumulating the greatest number of uneaten marshmallows that would be delicious were you ever to let yourself consume one. At some point, in order to experience the benefits of having received any in the first place, you’re going to have to eat a damn marshmallow.

It doesn’t matter how many times you delay gratification if you never get a reward for it.

To escape this loop, do something now just for your present self’s enjoyment. Don’t engage in self-destructive behaviour that you’d be better off avoiding but allow yourself to do something fun. That’s all.

Don’t confuse fun and pleasure. You want to do something that makes your present self feel happy, not just good for a brief moment. This can be anything you want.

If you don’t let yourself feel satisfaction in your life now, when will you ever? How you spend each day is how you spend your life.

You can’t control the future, at all.

Here’s a hard truth you need to swallow:

You are powerless in the face of the future.

Not just powerless, but completely powerless. Most people want to think they have complete control over their future. They want to believe they know exactly how the future will unfold. The future doesn’t even really exist, so how can you control it?

Life can throw anything at you it wants to.

You could be forced to deliver a speech to an audience of thousands. You could injure yourself while walking around your home. Sure, if life unfolded exactly how you wanted it to, many horrible things wouldn’t happen to you. At the same time, you could have never predicted meeting your greatest friends or having your most memorable experiences. Your life wouldn’t be so great then.

We’re terrible predictors of the future. We should stop pretending otherwise.

You don’t actually want complete control over your future anyways. You’ve just been fooled into believing so. Think: if you did have complete control, life would be extremely boring. There would be no surprises to wake up to. You would hate knowing how each day would play out. The unpredictability of life is what keeps it interesting in the first place.

You might as well stop worrying about the future then.

It will throw whatever it wants to throw at you and it’s likely that a lot of good things will be thrown your way (though we don’t often consider that).

The renowned Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

I’ve been thinking about a similar idea:

Stop being afraid of the worst thing that could happen to you in the future. Start believing you’ll be able to survive it.

You’ll just have to handle whatever the future serves you.

You’re not completely powerless though. You have complete control over now. You can make choices now to shape your future. You won’t get the exact outcome you want of course, but this is what you should be focused on.

Final thoughts

Living in the future is a waste of time.

You’ve been given the greatest gift anyone could ask for, more meaningful than trophies, fancy gadgets, or social media followers: a second chance. Each second you get is a second chance at life. Each second that passes isn’t guaranteed.

Neither the future you’re worrying about or the one where you’ve decided to start truly living are guaranteed as well.

All that’s guaranteed is the moment you’re in now, and that’s just passed. Don’t wait until the end to start enjoying life. Then, it’ll be too late.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca had a beautiful insight: all fools have one thing in common, they’re always getting ready to live.

The perfect moment in the future to start being happy, to do what you’ve been longing to do will never come.

Enjoying life isn’t something to procrastinate on.