I will get to my subject in a moment, but first, I must share this :

I was on the bus, and these teens behind me were trying to explain where one of them lived. At one point, when the listener had suffered a brain crash and said “I have never heard of there”, the one with the home in question said, ” Well, we live in parallel universes. ”

Clearly this is my kind of kid.

Anyhoo, the subject at hand is the future and having too much of it.

Today is a lovely day. Sunny and bright without the heat. Fru weather. And it got me thinking about how some people can live life a day at a time, enjoying every precious moment. They can stop and smell the roses without even thinking about the possibility of bees.

And I… can’t.

I am always looking for life’s booby traps. I am constantly worried about what is to come, and trying to see the potholes in time to swerve around them.

And traditionally, those of my ilk have had nothing but disdain for those of the opposite temperament.. We see them as blind, ignorant fools constantly blundering into easily avoided pitfalls and congratulate ourselves on being smarter and wiser than those idiots on the other side of the fence.

But here’s the thing : all that worry takes its toll.It drain energy and possibility from the present in order to patrol the future. And if you are plagued by inner demons, they will push you to greater and greater sacrifices of the present in order to pursue an impossibly high ideal of “safety”.

But there is nothing in the external world which can protect you from the enemy within.

That is what has happened with me, I think. Childhood trauma combined with high intelligence pushed me hard toward the future oriented end of the scale. In a desperate attempt to control outcomes, my mind constantly stretches itself as far into the future as it can, regardless of the cost to the present.

Sacrifice too much of the present, and you end up too weak to do anything at all. Your life becomes very unpleasant, and what is even worse is that, because you are so focused on controlling outcomes, you blame yourself for your sorry state.

And you ARE to blame, but not how you think.

So you end up with a shitty outcome despite your paranoia , and what is worse, your future oriented nature makes it very hard to see the here and now. It’s like you see life through a telescope. Your paranoia runs so deep that you feel like if you look away from your telescope for one second, disaster will strike.

Even if the whole goddamn planetarium is burning down around you.

And notice how neuroses turns possibility into certainty. It is not that if you look away from the telescope, disaster MAY happen. No, if you look away, it WILL happen.

That is superstitious thinking at its very worst.

So how does one stop being paranoid and take the present back from the demons of the past that push you into the future?

Answer when I get home.

(—)

And the answer is : I dunno.

Ha ha ha. I’d never do that to you people! For one thing, it would suggest I don’t have a theory, which we all know is impossible. Theorizing is as natural as breathing to me.

And maybe that comes from being future oriented as well. In the abstract sense, all theories are predictions, and what would a tragically future oriented person love more than to be able to predict the future?

Anyhow, to answer the question for real this time : I think rescuing yourself from the future requires finding some way to reach that deep part of you that never feels safe and therefore always feels paranoid, and sooth it somehow.

Only then can you pry your eye away from that telescope without thinking that means guaranteed disaster.

Because, you know,. that’s when they GET you. The one time….

Or so we tell ourselves when we want to reassure ourselves that our paranoid compulsions are actually justified. No really, I’m totally in control. My irrational compulsions are actually wisdom, caution, and intelligence!

Whether you try to control outcomes too much or too little, you’re equally wrong. It’s easy to count all the bad things that never happened to you because of your forethought. Far harder to see all the things you missed because you were too chickenshit to take even the tiniest of risks.

Especially when you don’t want to see them. Because if you did, you wouldn’t feel so goddamned smug about how ‘smart’ you are. You would realize that you are, in fact, an idiot, but not for failing to control outcomes.

For sacrificing too much in an attempt to do so. No matter how you look at it, when your method is antithetical to its own aims, you are doing something wrong.

And the thing is, reform means going in the exact opposite direction of your instincts. Your instinct is to respond to stress by thinking harder about it. By pushing yourself further towards trying to control outcomes. And when it’s something real you can actually do something about, that is absolutely the right response.

But when it’s something inside you driving you to try to control all outcomes forever and punishing you for your failure to complete this impossible task, you have to do the opposite of what your instincts tell you and worry less.

I know, I know. It sounds like absolute madness. Worse than madness, because madness makes a kind of sense. This is divide by zero consciousness crashing stuff.

How can you become safer by worrying less?

But that’s the thing : there is a lot more to life than safety. The idea is not merely to survive but to thrive.

After all, the point of all this is to be happy, right?

So what makes you happy?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.