Your timeframe is f*&%£d
How to gain perspective on life when making seemingly insignificant daily decisions
I once dated a girl who was both a fatalist and a femme fatale.
She ensnared me with her bashfully sleepy, sky-blue eyes and a ‘carpe diem’ philosophy that was acted out with borderline recklessness.
Being around her felt intoxicatingly life-affirming and bewilderlingly in the moment.
As a hopelessly romantic teenage boy, I was like putty..
When you read too many novels or identity too strongly with the archetypal characters in a Hollywood film, you begin to seek out adventure at any cost.
Love is not blind, rather it is oblivious to the truth, preferring to listen instead to the fictional narrative it aspires to.
Too much oxytocin makes you see foibles instead of flaws and if you get too close the microfibres of a glaring red flag start look like the sultry soft furnishings of a bohemian boudoir.
And so it was that the years rolled by and somehow I found myself living with this girl in a loveless, domestic nightmare that was entirely of my own making.
After all the neurochemicals had worn off I realised that my embarassingly adolescent ‘seize the day’ mantra had really been masking a deeply-rooted fear that I would not be able to achieve anything of permanence in this life.
This realisation became a harrowing call to action.
For her the effect was the opposite.
“What’s the point in anything?” — she would say.
“climate change will have killed us all by 2022 anyway.”
If it wasn’t global warming that caused her irritating apathy it was a geo-political catastrophe on the other side of the world, or when she was feeling less exotic, a dose of shallow comparison with another woman or a cheap bash at the patriarchy.
Through the thick smog of ennui and the myopic lens of depression her horizon never extended much beyond about the six month mark.
You can’t change the world in six months but you can have a ball in that time.
And so she did — often, and freely — living only with the near future in the back of her mind.
That was until 2022 rolled around when we met again after a bittersweet hiatus.
There she was again, no different, see.
A little weathered from the lifestyle, but really no different at all.
The years had passed but there had been no seismic shift in her life.
Why?
Because a seismic shift takes place only after years of barely measurable movements have created the pressure and friction for a tremor to be felt.
On their own, in the cold isolation our mundane daily lives, these micro-changes that require such conscious effort can barely feel worth our time.
With a short term horizon we can not even comprehend how our small actions in the present might bring about a dream reality years from now.
Although I didn’t have the words to express how I felt at the time, I have often wondered not only how different her life might have looked had she been able to see beyond the dark clouds of the near present, but also how different my own life might have looked had I not also harboured such narrow-minded thoughts.
But, if I had been able to articulate it to her back then, I might also have told her this…
Homosapiens have been around for 12,000 generations
For a creature that has dominated every other living animal on the planet since the Jurassic period, there is a certain level of hubris in human beings that beggars belief.
Across 300,000 years multiple offenders have inaccurately called time on our species and the prophetic forecasts only seem to appear more frequently as time goes on.
Oppenheimer became a meme, the cockroach-esque Nokia 3310 not only survived, but was living its best life years after Y2K, the Aztecs forgot to print their 2013 calendar and Ehrlich’s 1968 population bomb was proven to be a dud..
(and was rather excellently dismantled in the book ‘Super Abundance’ by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley)
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are still mounting their horses somewhere in the middle distance, just over that hill. I think…
We live in the age of the attention economy and so it should come as no surprise that doomsday predictions have gone through the roof since social media platforms realised that our worst fears might also be algorithmic,
No doubt, the problems facing humanity today are (in some ways) more challenging than those in the past.
I need not list them here — why spoil the mood?
But to deny the possibility that somehow the most developed civilisation of all time, armed with unprecedented collective resources and technoligical nous might be able to overcome them is an exercise in emotionally charged hysteria.
Let your daily decisions, beliefs and perspectives therefore reflect the fact that you’re probably going to live at least until your grandparents age — if not a good fraction longer.
On that basis, their achievements; home ownership, a picture-perfect nuclear family, cruises in retirement — which may seem so far out reach to the still-renting 30 somethings of the internet age- are a) probably not what you want anyway and b) attainable like anything else you desire if you adjust your timeframe.
Seize the day — one tiny revolution at a time
Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world
Boomers, the generation whose childhood was soundtracked by air raid sirens and sponsored by food rationing, have lived a life of incremental improvement.
By the time millenials were able to look over their shoulders, their grandparents had created a legacy that meant that everyone in the collective West could expect to live a life as stable and as comfortable as theirs.
The habits that they cultivated across decades and the quotidian routines that they never questioned seem to our dopamine-frazzled brains to be boring and monotonous.
Looking back on them from a baseline of privilege (by which I mean electricity, hot running water, actual choice in the supermarket, say…) we can somehow be led to feel that only drastic measures and radical transformation can lead to our feeling content.
What we forget is that habits when stacked over time don’t give boring incremental results — but compound exponentially.
Einstein’s now oft-misquoted (guilty!) homage refers to finance and compound interest — this at least can be explained by mathematicians, far cleverer than I.
Habits, disciplines, flow states — these are (for now) less scientifically measurable.
Nonetheless, their ability to compound over time may even be greater than the calculations of numerical interest.
When we consciously practice the skills that we aim to cultivate — whether that be writing on medium, learning another language for professional development or engaging in a competitive sport — we have no idea at what point the curve on the graph will suddenly lift off.
Only through steady, ritualised practice ( N.B purposefully avoiding the use of the words grind and hustle) that is IN-dependent of results can we find out whether we are doing something for pure enjoyment rather than the results it may bring.
Any activity that reduces your sense of ego, distorts your perception of time and silences the chatter in your mind is an activity you should commit yourself to over the long term — knowing full well that the fruits of your efforts may not be ready for years to come.
One of the great joys in this life that nobody warns you about is that feeling when you realise your efforts are paying off and what felt like walking through treacle no feels like a confident stride in your new zone of competence.
Celebrating that win by looking back along the journey instead of looking straight to the next challenge is one of the best ways to gain clarity and perspective on life’s journey.
The highs don’t come all at once, in some happy-ever-after ending — they are evenly distributed throughout if you know where to look for them.
Furthermore, these flow state success stories are unlikely to be race-line finish, photo-op moments.
Often it will be just you patting yourself on the back which makes them all the more important to mark and punctuate the journey as you go along.
Ultimately, no two peoples life arc looks the same.
Markers of success are not limited by time or age and the external world is unlikely to make even a dent on your ambitions unless you allow it to do so.
The actions that you take towards being the person that you want to be in ten years time will give you greater satisfaction in the future, than anything you could possibly do right now and any attempt to derail that inevitable future progress is the cognitive dissonance of a spectre that you were never meant to become.
A 97 year old starlet from the USA once said:
Life is long — and if you do it just right, then once is more than enough
And she would know…
Freddie Kift — I write about skill acquisition, flow states, working remotely, languages, and navigating the lived experience
