Present moment awareness — A quantitative analysis
I learned to eat my food strategically. In every meal, I finish eating all the foods I dislike first while saving up my favorite foods for the last hoping to enjoy them all at once in one big dose! Investing, right? But in reality, it took me a while to realize how dumb this strategy is. A number of things went wrong with this strategy. My favorite foods turned cold and they were not as enjoyable anymore. Some hungry bystanders would steal my yummy food I saved up before I could get to it. (Yes I am talking about you sis!).
Similarly, even in life, we tend to dedicate a lot of time planning and dreading the future instead of consuming the present moment itself. Every moment we dedicate towards crafting the future, we are hoping to enjoy that future to its fullest while compromising the NOW — and there are no guarantees that the future we craft is going to ever arrive. This moment right now was also crafted for its full consumption in the past. But, instead of enjoying this moment, we tend to fall trap to the perpetual cycle of crafting the future. We hope to stack all the moments into one big-ass future moment to overdose ourselves with!
If we spend all our moments thinking about improving the future moments, when will we enjoy the fruits of all the cumulative thinking we did? After we die? That sounds foolish. There is some better way here. Being an engineer — I am tempted to come up with an algorithm for life! Alas, I join the club of fools who try to contain life in a mathematical formula.
If we break down all of our life into chunks consisting of moments as shown in the image above, there are moments in red where we spend that moment replaying a past moment, there are moments in grey where we spend the present moment imagining a future moment, and finally a few real blue moments interspersed which are lived. These are the real moments. These are moments unclouded by our imagination. These are moments where the colors are vivid, sounds are crisp, with all our senses sharp focused at the HERE and the NOW! Some examples are when you are cooking your favorite recipe, spending time with close friends without a care about any other place or time, taking a stroll in a park etc. These are the memorable moments we all crave for.
Now, each moment is never 100% spent in the past, present or the future. Your senses are always capturing this moment fully while thinking about past/future! Even when we worry about future, at some level, we are always scanning the NOW for any threats, ready to act. So a part (fraction) of each moment is dedicated to the present and the rest to a different time. On a large scale collection of these moments, we can define the fraction of life lived in the present moment as:
This fraction, when really high could mean an extremely thrilling life. On the other hand when this fraction is low, it means a life spent brooding riddled with anxiety and all of its friends.
If you can quantify the fraction of awareness dedicated to real moments vs imagined past/future, what would the split look like for you?
Let us not delude ourselves into thinking that spending all our moments in the present is the solution. If it is skewed heavily towards the present with zero planning, most likely we live a life of future suffering or abrupt death! The incredible life of “The Alpinist” — Marc-André Leclerc illustrates this perfectly. A soul that burned like a bright comet for a short but sweet 25 years.
On the other hand, if is is heavily skewed away from the present, it does not guarantee a long life even. Anxiety kills! There seems to be a sweet spot of our parameter (fraction lived in the present) which maximizes the lifespan we get. We can illustrate this with a curve that might looks something like…
Is maximizing the amount of time we spend here on this planet all that matters though? Doesn’t the quality of that life we spend matter? It seems like a short but a sweet life is better than a long but miserable one. How do we take this into account?
What seems to matter instead is a product of the lifespan and the fraction of that life that was actually lived instead of imagined in our own heads.
What if we plotted the effective life lived instead? The above illustration is a simplified graph illustrating how the fraction of life lived in present (awareness level) and the lifespan come together to form final metric to be maximized — effective life lived.
Some conclusions from this analysis can be summarized as:
- What we can control is the fraction of attention we decide to dedicate to the sensory input of the present moment vs the imaginary predictions of a different time and place in our heads. This is the operating point on the X-axis.
- A life lived with anxiety is neither maximizing the lifespan nor maximizing the life lived
- An extremely thrilling life can mean a short life leaving behind suffering to others who loved us while we lived.
- Maximizing life span is not the same as maximizing the life lived
- A balanced fraction of life dedicated to the present moment can maximize the effective life lived.
The anxiety epidemic indicates that we as humans of the modern day are spending many of our lives unnecessarily hanging out in the left ends of this graph with little awareness of the present moment. We are neither maximizing our lifespans nor maximizing the life lived by doing so. And it is well worth the time of every individual to assess how their graph looks like and where they are on their graph and what we can do to tweak our operating points on the X-axis of this graph.
A life dedicated to surrendering to the present moment as it comes instead of trying to change it or resent it in any way can be the trick to moving up on the anxiety vs thrill scale. More practical tips to move along the X-axis of our graphs to be explored in an another article. Stay tuned, stay present!
