When Did You Stop Living in the Now?

On the fading power of the now

Photo by Ibrahim Abazid on Unsplash

I’ve never been very good at living in the now. I love to read and write because I like to be totally out of whatever now is; imagining some future in which the words will be read, and communing with dead voices from the past. I am addicted to that kind of time travel. 

Let me be clear, when I talk about the now I’m not necessarily talking about mindful awareness of the present moment. I’m not necessarily talking about the sensory experience of being in a body, or practices that help me remember what it feels like to be in the flow of my body’s experiences. So please don’t misunderstand me. Instead, when I talk about the now I mean something a little more public, a little less sensual, a little more ideological. The now is a spacetime: the time of the pure present. It’s a space of urgency, immediacy, and optimism. The now fixes things, and saves people. At least, that’s what the theology of the now tells us. 

For most of my life I’ve felt like my failure to live in the now is something along the lines of a character flaw. I’ve spent a lot of time begrudgingly acknowledging that I’m just out of tune with the now, and it’s one of my bad qualities. 

But I’ve been reassessing the theology of the now that I grew up with. I’m coming to realize that the now has changed in fundamental ways. I think its power and authority have waned. And I don’t feel, as much as I used to, like a sinner against the now. 

Growing up in the 1990s, and becoming an adult in the early 2000s, the now was as much a part of the good life as low-fat highly processed foods. Living in the now was what people who took care of themselves did. Whether they did it explicitly and vocally or whether they did it subtly and silently, living in the now was understood to be a virtuous thing to do. Many people who failed to thrive were failing because they were trapped in their past, or anxiously caught up in their obsessive visions of the future. They resisted the power of the now. 

But now, in this present moment, there’s a widespread nostalgia in culture (especially music and fashion) for the 1990s and early 2000s. Ironically, it’s this very nostalgia that’s been making me think about how strange, and ultimately how weak, the now actually feels right now. 

Part of this turn to the 1990s and 2000s is just the regular cycle of music and fashion. It’s been long enough: the babies and children of the 1990s are old enough to feel acute nostalgia now, so it’s time to recycle the detritus of their youth both to indulge them and to bring them to grief. But I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that one dimension of this hunger for the 1990s and early 2000s is a desire for something about that time that was allegedly simpler and better: for a time when maybe capitalism wasn’t definitely killing the livable planet, for a time when at least 50% of Americans felt a certain kinship in their optimism about the future, when it seemed like the next election might actually fix some of what’s going wrong, for a time when a college degree was a good investment, for a time when there was hope for the kids. The theology of the now was very much a part of all this. It was a time when the now was powerful, and promising. The now felt good, at least for those who felt entitled to enjoy it. 

Living in the now was what boomers were doing, now that they were done being hippies and had gotten jobs. Maybe they had real industry careers and they didn’t want to do LSD anymore. Or maybe they just wanted to do it once or twice a year. Instead, they wanted to read a nice book by someone who’d learned how to meditate, or pay for a weekend seminar with someone who had supposedly predigested and regurgitated Buddhism for them. They didn’t actually want to practice Buddhism. They didn’t want emptiness, unless it was a way to clean up their aesthetic, make it white, and fill it up with a bunch of Helvetica. They wanted something more robust and charged than an awareness of their own body in time and space. They wanted a world, a spacetime: they wanted a fresh, pure, powerful now. The sort of now that had the power to erase the nasty dust of the past, and to let them blast their way confidently into the future. They wanted the kind of now that was clean, white, and American—that was popping with energy, and that felt expensive. 

Where am I getting all this? What triggered me? Last weekend I indulged in a little nostalgia. The Flaming Lips were playing a show at the amphitheater around the corner from my house, and a friend who had tickets invited me to go with her. Their tour is totally nostalgic: during the show they play their complete 2002 studio album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The frontman, Wayne Coyne, is sixty-three, insanely charismatic, and a consummate entertainer. He makes the show incredibly fun. There were flashy retro graphics, giant pink robots with floppy penises, confetti, massive balloons, and a bird drone that briefly circled the audience. Middle aged people were enjoying themselves, young people were enjoying themselves. Even I was enjoying myself! It was a spectacle. 

At one point in the show, they played the song “All We Have is Now”. Select lyrics were displayed on a massive screen behind the band, and the word “now” kept popping up in green and white. “You and me were never meant to be part of the future,” Coyne sang. “All we have is now,” he said, “All we’ve ever had is now.” And the sound all around us was triumphant, as if we were all supposed to be glorying in the now, together. This would have been the moment, in 2002, where I looked around me and felt like a failed experiment because I was out of time in my head, instead of living in the now with everyone. But 2024 me could only observe that the lines felt flat and lifeless, not to mention immediately and absolutely untrue. 

Literally any biological body that exists is designed to continue its existence from one moment to the next: to endure, to exist within life (which is a process not a thing). We were, in fact, built for the future. Is that future a guarantee? No. Is this scary? Yes. So is it crucial to feel gratitude for whatever we cherish, and to express that to who and what we love? Of course. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think the future has nothing to do with us. We are creating the future with every single action we take. The future extends from within and around us. 

There’s an atomism to this theology of the now: as if I am a unit that can be severed from my past and future. In a cultural context where atomism and individualism reign, the theology of the now affirms a kind of free market presentism. This sort of sensibility is perfect for a consumer capitalist culture that wants us to forget that our every choice and decision will have some sort of consequence for future generations, just as we are both clinging to and yet also rejecting what our ancestors left behind for for us.

I no longer feel guilty that I never served this theology of the now. I’ve never not felt those who’ve died still with me in some important way. I can’t not think about the future generations of people who, I hope, will walk on the same earth we walk on now and who will have clean water to drink. In the present moment, I can feel an acute sense of connection to the people who inhabit these different forms of time and space. It’s part of my body’s own flow of experience in any given moment, including this one right now. Maybe this will be the leading cause of my failure to thrive. But I think that would still be better, to me, than living in the now.