Alan Watts and the Illusion of Time
When I started this YouTube channel, I became fixated on the day it would succeed. I stopped going out with friends and spent almost every waking moment working towards and dreaming about the future. When I did manage to go out with friends, I spent all my time daydreaming. I was stuck imagining a far-off future, a future that would never come.
Don't get me wrong; objectively, this channel is successful, and all of you who choose to watch these videos have literally changed my whole life. But the future I dreamed of will never come because there's always something more to chase, something bigger and better to look forward to. Many of us live life like this; we spend most of our time preoccupied with things that don’t exist and very little time enjoying the things that do.
When we're not fixating on the future, we're being haunted by the past. We spend our nights crawled up in bed thinking about the wrong choices we’ve made in the past and what we wish we’d done instead. As a culture, we're obsessed with time; we're both haunted by the past and dreading the future. But the truth is that the future and the past don’t exist.
We might think that the past and the future are as real as the present, but that's the illusion of time. In reality, the present is the only thing that exists or can exist. A clock tracks movement, like the rotation of the Earth in our orbit around the Sun, but its measurement of time isn't objective. There is only the present, and its direction is forward.
The past can be accessed by our memories or recordings, but even this access is tremendously limited. Our memory is fallible; we often misremember critical details of events and can be influenced to think we did something we never did. Memory itself is known to get less accurate each time we think to reflect on it, and when video is available, it doesn't give you the first-person experience. It's only a tiny piece of the past that doesn't truly capture what it was like to be there or the full range of emotions you felt at the time. The past is just a previous experience of the present; it doesn't exist.
The future hasn't happened yet. We might prepare for conditions like rain later in the week; many of us will make plans for a satisfying career. But these things don't exist, and there's a fair chance they won't ever exist. The forecast is often wrong, and careers rarely go as planned. If you continue to obsess over the past and the future, you’ll never truly live a full life. You’ll be too busy thinking about the moments that have either already passed or are yet to come. You'll forget to be present and to take it all in.
Whereas animals live primarily in the present, humans have strong memories; we combine time together. This can be helpful from a survival standpoint. Our species anticipates the future and prepares for it. Now, this was necessary for humans to successfully survive threats and to develop more complex societies. Early humans carved spears to take down woolly mammoths; they realized that if they made these weapons now, they'd have a better chance of killing a giant beast tomorrow. They also anticipated that a mammoth would provide sustenance for a long time, and by preparing for the future, they significantly increased their odds of survival.
This ability to plan for the future is why we're here today, but we've paid a heavy price for that practical sense of time, and that price is our happiness, our peace of mind. We're too stuck in the future to be at ease now. We make it all seem okay by telling ourselves the big lie. According to the British philosopher Alan Watts, this notorious untruth is that we think we’ll be happy in our imagined future, but it never comes. When that future does arrive, according to our current definition of time, we’ll be stuck in another imagined future.
Our minds will be focused on the future until our bodies no longer have a pulse, just like a donkey chasing a carrot on a string. We can never get closer to our meal, and our appetite will never go away. To an observer, the donkey is foolish, but from a first-person perspective, we’re convinced of the illusion. We don’t see the folly in our pursuits.