The question implicit in many peoples early January ponderings is essentially this: how do I or how should we, collectively plan to use the coming year? Your answer might involve getting fit, or finding a soulmate, or making a million dollars selling virtual kale snacks online to idiots. Or it might focus on activism, or just on getting by, and staying moderately sane in trying times. But its worth noting that all these different goals share the same underlying assumption, one so basic its easy to miss: that time is best approached, in the first place, as something you use.

But is it? The problem with treating every year (or week, or hour) as something youre supposed to put to use is that you end up living permanently focused on the future. The more strenuously you try to get something out of life, the more emotionally invested you become in reaching the point at which youve succeeded in doing so which is, necessarily, never now. In other words: try too hard to make life meaningful, and it becomes impossible to derive any meaning from your present-moment life.

John Maynard Keynes articulated the matter well in a famous 1930 essay (in which he did, admittedly, also claim wed only be working 15 hours a week by this point in history). The purposive man, he wrote, is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cats kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. The upside of this attitude is that you get to feel more in charge of your life; the downside is that you never really get to enjoy it.

Certain spiritual teachers, adherents of the philosophy known as non-duality, would go further. Theyd claim that the whole idea of using time is based on an illusory separation between you and the time youre attempting to use. From your first-person perspective, all there is at any given moment in time is just whatever youre experiencing: a tingling in your leg, the sight of your kitchen table, the car alarm going off outside, a vague irritation at being asked to contemplate these kooky New Age ideas. And isnt it a little odd to then decide that some of these arising perceptions are you who must then use the other ones, in some particular way, in order to have used time well? Why not put that stress-inducing notion aside?

In her (excellently titled) book on non-duality, Radically Condensed Instructions For Being Just As You Are, Jennifer Mathews gets straight to the point: We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal lifes provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside. Partly, I confess, I like this because it reminds me of the comic Steven Wrights line: You cant have everything where would you put it? But its also a helpful pointer in its own right to the truth that, ultimately, the only purpose of any of this is, well, this.

Robert Wright probes the idea that the individual self might be an illusion in his 2017 book, Why Buddhism Is True

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Are you living too much in the future at the expense of now? - The Guardian