Dear Dr K,
I am in a bit of a dilemma. I am used to receiving nuggets of wisdom from my parents, teachers, and other elders. I do my best to imbibe the values espoused in these sayings, like ‘honesty is the best policy’, but I am having trouble with a certain nugget of wisdom, which is variously phrased as ‘live in the moment’, ‘do not worry about the past or the future, simply enjoy the now’, ‘today is a gift, which is why it is called the present’, and so on. The reason I am having trouble with this nugget of wisdom is that it is contradicted by advice from the very same people to study hard so I can be successful in the future, to drink milk and eat vegetables so I can grow up to be strong and healthy, and so on. In short, I am being asked simultaneously to live in the present and to think about the future. What am I supposed to do?
Kwan Dary
Dear Kwan,
Here is a nugget of wisdom from me to you: true wisdom is very difficult to condense into one-line nuggets. So if the sole guiding force in your life is a collection of pithy aphorisms, you should probably think about expanding the scope of what you consider to be wisdom.
In any case, your question is still a valid one: at any given moment of our lives, should we do all we can to increase our enjoyment of that moment, or should we instead invest it in our future by doing something that may be unpleasant now but will yield benefits at a later point? Of course, both are necessary — you cannot subsist on a diet of gulab jamuns and claim to be enjoying the moment, nor can you continually put off any kind of enjoyment in order to reap greater rewards in the future. Your future is not an unlimited reserve of time — at some point you will die, and your enormous amounts of saved money and health and talent will no longer be of any use to you.
The easy answer would be to say that one’s moments should be divided equally into enjoying the present and investing in the future. But this is not a very helpful answer, as it offers no advice on how to go about dividing our moments. The logical answer should be to invest in the future in the first half of your life, so that the latter half may be spent enjoying what you have invested. But here again the problem is that, one’s youth presents greater opportunities for enjoyment than one’s middle or old age.
So while it may not help to broadly categorise life into moments that must be enjoyed in the present and moments that must be invested in the future, perhaps it makes sense to consider this question on a moment-by-moment basis. You would not, for example, want to revise mathematical theorems while you are riding a rollercoaster. Similarly, on the day before your maths exam, you would not want to visit an amusement park, unless of course you are already supremely confident of your ability to tackle the exam. But life is not made up of moments in which the choice is so obvious.
The solution I propose, then, is to try and condense your entire life, past, present, and future, into a single moment in which you are always living. In this way your two nuggets of wisdom will not be contradictory. Transcend your narrow perceptions of time and take on a cosmic perspective. That should be quite easy.
Yours questionably,
Dr K