How philosophy taught me to enjoy the moment

As someone who has been trying to become a doctor for the past four years, it can be said that much of my life has been spent in pursuit of an idealized future. This is, of course, not unique to me alone. After all, everyone is pursuing their ideal future. To some extent, this is a reflection of the basic structure of human thinking. We take stock of where we are, conceptualize a better point, and chart a course towards that point. The result of this non-stop mental GPS system is that our lives can be seen as a constant struggle towards a point that we never actually reach. This is one of many reasons why French philosopher Albert Camus described humanity as sharing the same fate as the Greek hero Sisyphus who was doomed to eternally roll a boulder up a hill only to restart upon nearly reaching the peak.

Doesn’t something seem off about this picture? Is life really just a struggle towards a goal that is never actualized? Or is there more? This speaks to the core of why many philosophies have the basic teaching that life is suffering. They posit that after all the stimulation is gone, all we are left with is consciousness experiencing a vast amount of meaningless time. So then, it is the job of philosophy to solve this problem by introducing meaning into the world.

I grew up in a Christian family. In Christianity, life is supposed to have inherent meaning, and yet, this life meant nothing to me because once it ended I would experience a new, eternal life in heaven where suffering would never exist. I don’t believe most Christians take this belief to its logical conclusion, but to me, it made sense that I should make the most of this life and then leave it as soon as possible, right? Get saved, convert a few people, love someone, and then GET OUT! No need to get old, no need to pay taxes, no need to live a life where I might later get tempted and lose my salvation. Nonetheless, life did seem to have stable, inherent meaning in that world. That was the case for me until something upset that paradigm.

Sometimes Christians talk to each other about what they want to do in heaven with eternal time. It’s a fun game to try to think of enough activities to fill eternity. But eventually, the thought must come, “Won’t I. . . get bored?” Even if I learned every possible skill, if God were to re-invent basic universal laws in a second universe and I were to re-learn everything, even if this were to occur hundreds of times, wouldn’t the knowledge become saturated at some point? Like the famous satirical riddle claims, "An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being only lacks one thing: limits." Similarly, after knowing and experiencing everything with eternal life, perhaps there is only one experience is left: death.

[Spoilers in next paragraph for the final season of The Good Place]

In the final season of The Good Place, a philosophical comedy centered on a group of characters who have died and gone to “The Good Place,” this question is posed with an interesting solution. Once our characters have entered heaven they soon realize that heaven is a mess because no one knows what to do anymore. Eventually, Michael finds a solution and places a new doorway in heaven. If you choose to, at any time, you can walk through it and stop existing. Now that the possibility of not existing is placed before them, suddenly many people realize that they are not quite done living just yet. There are more meaningful things they want to do before they pass on.

Even though for most Christians the prospect of eternal life is supposed to give life its meaning, I found more meaning coming from the idea of death. This, to me, is the root of Greek teaching memento mori, or remember death. Perhaps death is what brings meaning to our lives. By reflecting on the fact that death can occur without warning, it encourages us to live to our fullest each day; to stop living as if life is eternal, but as if it is finite and each moment really counts.

In his own approach to living to the fullest in each moment, Nietzsche came up with an idea known as “The Eternal Recurrence.” The basic idea is this: Imagine a supernatural being comes to you and says that you will die right now, and then you will be forced to re-live your entire life exactly the same way for the rest of eternity. Each time you die you will lose all your memories and upon rebirth no events in your life course will ever change. Nietzsche then asks, “Would you call this being an angel or a devil?” This thought experiment encouraged him to live in such a way that he could call the being an angel. Despite the suffering in life being a given, he still hoped to live in a life-affirming way so as to make each moment worth it.

So then, should we all try to live in the present, forgetting the past and the future, so that we can enjoy this moment we have now to its fullest? Not quite. Like the Taoists preach, as with all things we must take them in their measure. Neither too much nor too little, but whatever nature calls for at that moment.

We should not stop planning for the future, nor should we cease reminiscing about good times in the past. My favorite example of this comes from Albert Camus’s The Plague. Once a plague has forced a town into quarantine the townsfolk start to settle into this new lifestyle that seems to have lost its color. He describes the town as experiencing, “The feeling of exile - that sensation of a void deep within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time.” Then, when describing the state of those separated from their families or their partners, he says my favorite lines,

“ We had nothing left us but the past and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they speedily abandoned the idea once they felt the wounds the imagination inflicts. Therefore, they forced themselves to cease looking to the future, always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But naturally enough, the habit was ill-rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. And thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived.”

I believe that we cannot live solely in the present, rejecting the future and the past, but that we should minimize the times in our life when our mind is not in the present moment. It’s always easy to get lost in thought about our own lives, the matters we have pressing in on us, and the future we wish we could be experiencing, but I find that the more I tune into the moment, the more I can enjoy my life. Even if nothing exciting is happening, I appreciate knowing that I’m here and that I’m enjoying this life, right now.

Then it feels like I'm finally living.