The Present is Thicker Than Ever

From John Martin Illustrations of Paradise Lost (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1085301038).

I KNOW THAT for most people the new year is a time of resolution and forward momentum, but for me it’s always a time of recollection. I find myself glancing back at the rush of moments from the previous year, like a dwarf surveying piles of gold in a treasure hall. On the eve of the new year, it feels like I have one night to take what I can from the 525,600 minutes that just flowed by and tell a little story with them.

This year, though, I find myself looking further back, to the half decade since 2020. More and more, every year, 2020 feels like a paradigm shift. It’s a moment that changed not just what happens in the world, but how I think about time itself. Do you feel that, too?

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SOMETHING HAPPENED to the future, around 2020. The future is always a fiction, but in 2020 it became a big story that was more difficult to tell. Big things—like institutions—began to feel much more mortal. They were no longer great steamboats, hauling us into the future that modernity had promised.

When my daughter was born in 2016, for instance, we began optimistically setting aside money for her college education. We were certain it would be incredibly expensive. But I would never have predicted that less than ten years later, in 2025, I would be genuinely unsure whether anything that looks recognizably like college would even exist in 2035, when she’s ready to go.

I’m not making claims about the end of anything. But I am uncertain about my capacity to plan for the future in ways that I wasn’t five years ago, because the future itself looks cloudier (and less enticing) than it once did.

The past has changed, as well. I’m not nostalgic for it. But it feels closer, and more present, than it used to. As the future has stopped dragging me forward with such urgency, the past feels more hyperreal, its outlines look sharper and clearer. And problems of the past seem much less resolved.

I found myself thinking, recently, how ideas that once struck me as outdated, or naive, make a certain kind of strange sense to me now. I can recall, ages ago, finding it absurd to learn that when photography was a new technology many people had a kind of spiritual revulsion to it. They were anxious about what it might do to, existentially, to capture a person’s image like that and freeze it in time and space. Their hesitation and skepticism feels more accessible to me now; some discomfort from their world has pressed in against mine.

The past and the future seem to have convened, increasingly, into a thicker sense of the present.

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TECHNOLOGY, AND massive changes in the way I live with and against it, is a large part of what’s changed my sense of time over the last five years. I’m thinking differently about both the past and the future in large part because of the existential disorientations, and reorientations, that technology has been driving, especially since 2020.

The Internet, as our portal into the digital, is a spacetime. It reworks our experience of both space and time, flattening and brightening the nature of experience itself.

In 2020, hiding away from a pandemic in the dark burrow of my home, I needed the digital to make the world feel accessible. Billions of other people felt the same way. So we became like moths, drawn to the bright flat light of the digital world and opening ourselves to it in ways that would have felt too risky, before. There was something people needed, then, from that bright flat present tense.

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of social and political fallout from that rapid and dramatic (and irreversible) reorientation in space and time. The fallout is bad enough that some even seem convinced that the digital is the new face of evil (forgetting that evil is too old, and powerful, and endemic to limit itself to a paltry technological infrastructure.)

But I can see, and perhaps many of you also feel, that this paradigm shift, while offering much, has driven a lot of loss. Perhaps nothing marks this loss more clearly than the rapid adoption of AI, which is eroding already fragile infrastructures in order to hasten a digital shift that was already well underway. We’re told that whatever is happening is inevitable, and perhaps this feels believable because there’s been such a rapid shift in time and space since 2020. A massive change feels both inevitable and underway.

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IF TIME HAS CHANGED, since 2020, then I think 2025 was the year I began to adapt.

I’ve always been an existential thinker. I’m preoccupied with finitude, uncertainty, and the layers upon layers of meaning that are always there to sort through. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that I would feel these temporal shifts so acutely. Technology has become more existential to me this year. It’s a new lens I’ve been looking through, as I think about the shape of the present, the past, and the future.

Over the last year, I’ve tried to trace these shifts, here on Substack. I’ve explored attention, inner life, the political theology of tech, chatbots as confessionals, friction as spiritual practice, and the erosion of what used to feel like the real. All of these pieces, I realize now, are attempts to respond to this new temporal reality.

I don’t predict a sudden shift in the coming year, but I find myself increasingly curious not just about what unfolds in the bright, flat spaces of the digital, but about how the darker zones of experience are shifting in response to it. I want to explore how those spaces, especially the ones that are interior (the zones of inner life) are shifting in response to these external changes in space and time. The bright flat present makes these dark inner spaces more difficult to see, and more incomprehensible. But I’m most interested in what we can’t see.