Anywhere But Here | Day 6 of 100
How Time-Hopping Pulls Us Away from Present Meaning
One night after graduating high school some friends and I are polishing off our Wendy's Frostys in a parking lot. We're updating each other about what each of us is doing at the end of the summer when the next phase of our life begins. Some of us going off to college, some going to work right away, some traveling.
As the July insects swarm the light posts above and cricketsong scores the moment, I feel like an outsider in the conversation. We're talking about the futures we will each inhabit and everyone seems to be excited—
Except me.
The beginnings of tears sting my eyes and I decide to go throw away my Frosty in the nearby dumpster to compose myself.
When I was a little boy, the story goes that I'd cry every time my mother would redecorate the house. Moving a couch, painting a dresser or getting new sheets for the bed just wouldn't do. Tears would roll down my cheeks and I'd plead with my mother to stop this restructuring of my life. I just wanted things to remain the same.
I had early-onset nostalgia.
Which evolved into full-blown nostalgia.
I recall feeling a sense of anxiety, not excitement as we neared the end of high school. I'd found my friends, I'd found what I was good at. We'd built a container of familiarity and I knew how to play the game in a way that validated my sense of self.
And the future threatened to rip all of that away.
As I ambled back from the dumpster that July evening, my friend Michael notices my distress. Holding his Frosty in one hand, he hooks his other arm around my neck and says, "Buddy - it's going to be so good. You have no idea how good it's going to be."
"But it won't be this." I whisper back.
The first year of college was hard. Not only because it was a transition away from the familiar container I mourned, but also because the college I attended was completely rooted in an attempt to preserve what was. I did the thing you're absolutely not supposed to do:
I followed my high school girlfriend to college instead of going with my first pick.
And how do you think that went?
Spoiler: She left me for the TA in her biology class. He played the oboe in the marching band.
The oboe.
How could I compete with that?
Forced to make due with my present circumstances, I eventually started participating in the college experience. By the time college graduation rolled around I'd found college to be an even richer experience than high school ever was.
And the summer after college graduation while everyone took internships, moved cities to take jobs, or rolled into a graduate program, what did I do?
Crash at a younger buddy's apartment working an hourly job for a local newspaper so I could hang onto the last vestiges of university life with the folks who were still living it.
And how do you think the transition from college to the real world went?
Because I had not interest in my future, because I longed for my college life to continue, my first year out of college was not a fun one. I'd spent no time searching for jobs or thinking about my future, so I settled for a job back in my hometown and moved back in with my parents. Most weekends I'd drive back down to my college town to spend time with those lucky bastards still living the story I never wanted to end.
This cycle has repeated itself in my life more times than I care to admit. When faced with a transition, I immediately rebel against it believing it could never top what I currently have. And after I have no choice but to move into the next season of my life I spend the entire time wishing my life looked like it did, instead of participating in the present moment.
That's me. That's my story. I wonder about you? Do you find yourself pining for the past? Or do you miss out on the present because you have the other affliction?
An obsession with the future.
Most folks fall into one of two camps. My wife spends much of her time anticipating with excitement how wonderful the future could be. When we're on a vacation she literally plans the next vacation. She looks at houses on Zillow when we have a perfectly fine house. She plans events and interactions spinning up possibilities and as a result, can also miss the present.
She's done a great job of grounding herself in the here and now, and with some work, so have I. But we still both have default ways of viewing the world and it seems most everyone generally falls into one of two camps. When the present moment doesn't give us what we want, we either escape into the Mythology of the Past to a time when all was right with the world or we fast forward into the Fantasy of the Future where we'll finally live the life we always knew we could.
We could all agree that being in the present moment matters. We'll explore more strategies and philosophies around rooting in the present moment in future essays. But for now, I want to work on articulating the unconscious draw we have to the past and future to help us find meaning in our lives when our current circumstances seem devoid of it.
To do so, I thought I'd take a stab at sharing two well-known stories as an exercise in using literary examples to help folks better understand meaning and how we miss it.
The Mythology of the Past
The Great Gatsby is set in the glitzy world of the 1920s and follows a wealthy, mysterious man named Jay Gatsby who seems to have it all. Except the one thing he really wants: a second chance with the woman he loved years ago. Told through the eyes of his neighbor, the novel slowly reveals that beneath all the luxury and parties is a man trying to bring the past back to life, and losing touch with reality in the process.
Gatsby is consumed by his idealized memory of Daisy and their brief romance five years earlier. He buys the mansion across the bay just to stare at the green light on her dock, throws elaborate parties hoping she’ll wander in, and builds his entire identity around recreating a past that probably never existed the way he remembers it.
When he finally reunites with Daisy, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that famous line:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Gatsby literally cannot see Daisy as she actually is—a shallow, careless person who’s moved on. He’s so trapped by his mythology of their perfect past that he misses every signal in the present, right up until it destroys him.
The tragedy isn’t just that Gatsby dies—it’s that he never actually lives. Every conversation with Daisy, every gesture, every hope is filtered through his nostalgia for something already gone. He can’t see that the woman in front of him isn’t the girl from his memory.
There’s that devastating moment when Daisy starts crying over his beautiful shirts, and Gatsby thinks it’s about their lost love—but the reader understands she’s just overwhelmed by his wealth. He’s literally watching his present through the lens of his past and seeing something that isn’t there.
I'll share studies later about the psychological function of misremembering our pasts in order to make life feel more meaningful, but for now the point to communicate is that our brains are meaning-makers, not historians.
Memory is filtered, edited, softened, and shaped—most often unconsciously—to help us feel good, make sense of life, or avoid discomfort.
So when we build our lives around what we remember, especially if that memory is polished into myth, we risk missing what’s actually happening now.
The Fantasy of the Future
If Gatsby shows us the consequences of believing meaning is found in the past, Peter shows us the cost of constantly chasing the future. Peter and the Golden Thread is a timeless parable often retold in children's storybooks and moral collections about the dangers of being too future-focused.
Peter, an excitable young boy, longs for the future and is restless in the present moment. Until one day, he’s wandering in the forest and meets an old woman who gives him a silver ball with a golden thread protruding from a hole.
“This is your life thread,” she tells him, and explains that if he doesn’t touch it, life will pass by normally. But if he wishes time to pass more quickly, he can tug on the thread to speed up his life.
What begins as a desire to skip the school day so he can go home and play turns into an obsession with the future Peter can’t escape. He wants to skip to summer, to fast-forward through school, to leap to the day he becomes a carpenter, to jump ahead to marriage, to bypass enlistment in the army, and so on.
Before he knows it, he’s at the end of his life. The golden thread has faded to silver, then grey. His wife is sickly. His children are gone. And again he meets the same woman in the forest, who asks:
"Did you live a good life?"
"I'm not sure," Peter says. "Your magic ball is a wonderful thing. I have never had to suffer or wait for anything in my life. And yet it has all passed so quickly. I feel that I have had no time to take in what has happened to me, neither the good things nor the bad. Now there is so little time left. I dare not pull the thread again, for it will only bring me to my death. I do not think your gift has brought me luck."
The woman, after chastising him for being foolish and selfish, grants him one final wish—and Peter chooses to live his life again, this time with all the pain, hurt, and boredom included.
He wakes in his bed. A boy again. His mother is calling him so he won’t be late for school. He breathes a sigh of relief.
There's research about this we can dig into later, but for now I think we can agree that we overestimate the joy the future will bring, underestimate how quickly we’ll adapt, and get caught in cycles of anticipation that disconnect us from right now.
So while hope and planning are part of being human, escaping to the fantasy of the future robs us of the only place where meaning is actually made: the present.
Time Hopping
There's probably a more scientific term that already exists about this (share it with me if you know it!). But for now, as I build out this universe of ideas about meaning, how we make it, and what prevents us from doing so, I'll label our tendency toward the past or future: Time Hopping.
The hope is to create a mental trigger that can help bring us back to the moment when we catch ourselves escaping the present because we falsely believe meaning is found somewhere else.
Thoughts?