At some point in my early adolescence I began to feel as if I was living in the past. Not in terms of personal emotional history, but in terms of history itself. That what counts as the present might as well be the past.
It's not the where is my jetpack feeling. It's not that Now isn't the now we thought it would be. It's looking around and knowing that the way we clean, the way we read, the way we communicate, our whole way of life will be a sad, whimsical footnote in history books that probably won't be books. It's the they thought they'd have jetpacks feeling.
Working with technology exacerbates this feeling. It's hard to suss out the worth in Right Now if your head is wrapped up in what comes next: the next release, the advances you know are around the corner. Engineers working on version 2.0 wave away bug reports on the current version. "It'll be fixed in the rewrite." Don't bother me with that. It's already in the past, even if it's a current trouble for someone else.
You can't live in the past, but it's never the future.
Oct 3, 2007
Living In The Past
3 comments:
We don't have jetpacks because people don't want jetpacks. People want a cure for cancer and their fears averted.
When I am overwhelmed by feelings like your post describe, it helps me to think about what the right things to be doing are, and ask myself why I am not doing them. Most of th time, the answer is surprisingly simple. When it's issues like "not enough time", it becomes slightly more difficult, but not impossible. When the answer is "because that's the way things work," I defer to your earlier "intuition usually beats process" post.
Your post brings up memories from when I was a kid. I used to think about things like surgery, capital punishment, and meat and about how history would regard them. Cutting people open to cure them and killing animals for food and criminals for justice seem so weird when you remove the "because this is how we do it" reasoning.
Taking a small step towards where you need to be is a lot easier than being overwhelmed by the distance to cover.
I spend most of my time feeling like I am living in the future. So much of the tech that I use daily is stuff that would have been unthinkable to even me-as-a-child. But impressive tech quickly becomes commonplace, and it's easy to forget how it felt at first.
It's easy, I think, to take the future for granted, particularly when you're frequently asked to look beyond the present. But personally, when I stop and look at what's around me, I do get a little awed and I am filled with hope.
I love this post because I have a very similar feeling. Reading it has started me thinking in a way that will most likely set the tone for the whole day
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