The tyranny of the future

As I close in on forty, I’m becoming terrifyingly aware of my own mortality. Of course, I know this is common with people my age—mid-life crises are so frequent as to be cliche—and it is surely absurd to think of 39 or 40 as “old” or close to death. But I can’t help ruminating. The likelihood that I am nearing the halfway point of my life plagues me with thoughts of a past full of wasted years and foregone opportunities, and a future offering only steady decline and entangling obligations. Lately, I’m asking all the classic questions: What have I done with my life? Is it too late to make significant changes? What endeavors are still worth pursuing with my remaining years?

While becoming increasingly tied to job responsibilities, aging family members, and my own slowly declining physical strength and energy, I worry that my chances to do things like raise kids or travel the world are steadily slipping away. I am constantly thinking of the German concept of torschlusspanik, or “gate-closing panic.” The idea literally refers to the old practice of closing a city’s gates at night for safety, whereupon those who failed to enter before sunset were stranded outside for the night; metaphorically it represents the fear that one’s time is running out and opportunities are closing, like gates, everywhere you look.

But sometimes, in a moment of clarity, I pause and ask myself—isn’t it really just a matter of framing? Doesn’t my knowledge of mortality and impending old age create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy? If I did not know that most people don’t live past 80 (the average is just shy of 79, I believe) or if I were simply ignorant of the concept of death, would I feel the same about turning 40? Physically, although I have less energy now and take longer to heal from muscle strains and such, I still feel pretty vigorous, and mentally I still seem quite sharp. Psychologically, I think of myself as closer to 30 than 40 (perhaps partly since I have not married and do not have kids, so I haven’t “grown up” in certain traditional ways). If I had no idea that old age and death await me, how would I feel and behave?

Far better than I currently do, surely. The fear and anxiety that haunt me only exist because of my tendency to think of my life as half over. There is nothing objectively wrong with me physically or cognitively; it is only my knowledge of the future that weighs me down. My worry and anguish are a product of my ability to see far ahead—to know of my own mortality and the decay that awaits me—and to then obsess over those facts so much that they contaminate my life here and now. This is in stark contrast to the healthy response to aging that I should be embracing: eat nutritiously, continue to exercise body and mind, participate in friendships and hobbies that give me joy—the productive work of lengthening one’s life span and ensuring that the remaining years are the best they can be.

Alas, my neurotic tendencies mean that I dwell almost exclusively on the unproductive side of the issue. And this leads me to wonder…are we sometimes better off living in ignorance of the future? Wisdom traditions often tell us to live in the moment; it’s all we really have, and we waste it if we fret over the future instead of participating in the present. Maybe I am wasting my perfectly good middle years because I’m obsessing over a fate which I can possibly delay but never escape. Maybe it’s like the Oedipus prophecy, in which a king was foretold a future that he feared, whereupon he acted rashly (and unethically) in an effort to circumvent that future, which only resulted in it coming true. If the king had ignored the prophecy, or never heard it in the first place, it might still have come to pass, but his days until then would have contained much more present-based happiness and much less future-based anxiety. So is ignoring “prophecy” and eschewing future knowledge actually a better way of living?

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Let’s recap the Oedipus myth, which most of us only know in passing. When King Laius consulted the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, he was told that any son he conceived would one day kill him. So when a son was born to him and his wife, he sent baby Oedipus into the mountains to die of exposure. The child was saved by a shepherd and ended up in the care of another king and queen, who raised him as their own and did not tell him of his adoption. When grown, Oedipus went himself to the oracle at Delphi to learn the truth of his ancestry, but he was instead told that he would murder his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he fled his adopted homeland (wanting to spare his “parents”) and ended up back in Thebes, his actual place of birth, where he did indeed unwittingly kill his biological father (Laius) and marry his biological mother (the now-widowed queen Jocasta). Of course, the moral of this story is that you cannot escape fate, but it also seems to imply that there is danger in striving to know and control your future.

For both Laius and his son Oedipus, the glimpses of the future provided by the oracle did not help them avoid a terrible fate, but instead sent them inexorably toward it. Their knowledge of their destiny did not engender wisdom or calm acceptance, but instead resulted in fear and paranoid anxiety. So it’s easy to imagine that they would have been much happier and more at peace if they remained ignorant. As much as we humans celebrate our growing knowledge and seek to expand our capacity for foresight, we often fail to see the downsides of this quest. Excessive knowledge of possible futures can sometimes paralyze us, resulting in an inability to choose from too many paths or options, such that our present days slip steadily away from us while we worry obsessively over our insecure future; or, alternatively, some knowledge can make us reckless, inciting us to either plunge toward a future we see as inevitable in the hopes of somehow controlling it, or to violently flee a future that we fear and in doing so making ourselves miserable and possibly precipitating an even worse fate.

Although I sometimes envy animals like dogs or rabbits who, to the best of our knowledge, live almost entirely in the present moment and have little concept of a future self, I know that such a mind-state is generally impossible with the human brain. The closest we can come might be amnesia patients with damage to their hippocampus—this seems to not only impair their remembrance of the past, but also inhibit their ability to imagine the future, to the extent that they live almost entirely in the present. The next best thing might be the mindfulness practice within Buddhism and similar religions, and I have indeed made efforts to meditate and otherwise train my mind to exist in the here and now, but it’s decidedly difficult for a mind that bounces around as much as mine.

Increasingly, I am recognizing the peace and serenity that come with productive labor. And here I don’t mean mind-numbing office work or unpleasant but necessary daily tasks; I mean the kind of enjoyable activity that engages both the body and the mind. For me, this occurs when I’m tending my butterfly gardens, diligently planting flowers and pulling weeds. Or when I’m assembling a bookshelf and deciding how to arrange its contents. Or when I’m typing up a blog post and working out the best sequence to my arguments. My body is at least lightly active, and my mind is focused just enough by the task at hand that it cannot wander too far afield; instead it stays rooted (mostly) in the here and now, engaged in a task that offers me small dopamine hits with each successfully executed step, and finally the general satisfaction that comes with the completion of the work. Such activities short-circuit my usual tendency for passive naval-gazing, a habit which mostly results in anxiety and doubt. So although I typically spend inordinate amounts of time inside my head, worrying over what comes next and trying anxiously to navigate future paths, I’m learning that I’m far happier when I find challenging and constructive things to do with my hands and mind that can keep me grounded in the present.

Of course, I also realize the dangers of using such activities as a form of escapism—it’s just as easy to flee the responsibility of creating your own future by burying yourself in the present as it is to do the opposite. As with so many things in life, there’s probably a healthy compromise to be found somewhere in the middle. It’s necessary to plan for the future to an extent (e.g., making a will, plotting a career path, anticipating health risks); however, we must learn to limit our future-thinking to things that are within our sphere of influence. Obsessing over hazy outcomes that are beyond our control is self-sabotaging, and in those instances one can benefit from a healthy dose of productive labor. And if it’s generally better to live as if ignorant of old age and death, then it’s equally wise to participate in endeavors that can also be treated as infinite. The most rewarding projects are those in which we pursue the means continuously, without expectation of an end, because the process itself is the source of delight. So my goal moving forward is to live a life replete with those kinds of occupations, in the hope that—although I will still grow old and die—I will not wither and shrink before my appointed time. I want to be too busy living to worry much about dying.