“Live in the present." It’s not uncommon to hear that expression. But why does everyone keep on saying it? I mean, shouldn’t we be optimistic and have people look to their futures? Is that not the end goal, or at least a goal? I mean, the future defines our goals. It’s what everybody is interested in. They also ask us what we want to be when we grow up and where we see ourselves in five years. I suppose telling us to live in the present is better than the ubiquitous and foreboding warning of “don’t dwell on the past." But which temporal mantra of society do we obey? Live for the future and the present, not the past. Then why have memory? Why tell stories in the first place.

Here’s what really gets me though. There is no future. Every moment in the turbulent progression of the 4th dimension has the shortest lifespan of anything in the universe. Everything before this hundred millionth of a second right now is the past and one hundred millionth of a second later the previous hundred millionth is also the past. Therefore we only travel through time in the present, and each present becomes the past. So there is never a future to reach, there is only the present. So even though you say you want to be an astronaut further in your lifespan, or you see yourself as CEO in five rotations around the sun from now, it’s a futile dream. There is no future. There will never be. So asking that question is pointless. You have no future, deal with it.

It gets even stranger, and possibly depressing. People who say that are living in the present are simply kidding themselves, stuck between the causative past and an important future. We are too preoccupied with memory or expectation to believe in the present anyway. Stay with me here. So the present may not exist, nor might the future. Are we just left with the past? Are we living in the past? Well, we—as living beings—are stuck in this continuity field, due to the speed of light not being infinite. When we look at, say, the moon, since it is far away from us, it takes time for the light to reach us. Because of this, we are looking at the moon one or two seconds in the past. This is the same for the sun, or that mountain on the horizon, or even you (points to back of auditorium) sitting in the back of the audience. Everything we see at a distance—which is everything—is just a reflection of the past. The further away it is, the older it is. Simple right?

So, our past is obviously fixed. It has happened, making every foot we see approximately a nanosecond in the past. We are living in this fixed reality where everything has already happened. Have I lost you? No? Good. It gets better. How can none of these three places, if they can be called places, not exist? Well, let’s argue, in theory, that they are all the same. That all three exist on top of each other. There is no distinction between the three. It’s like viewing every frame of a movie at the exact same time. There is no longer a linear progression. No movement of images. No sequence of scenes. No story. It is just a jumbled random mess. So is time not the same? When the stacked film plays, it’s just a flash of who-knows-what, thousands of images morphed into each other. At standard film speed, each image is 1/26 of a second. Nice and slow. Time is the same, but really fast. It’s all a conglomeration of instances, be it past, present or future. It all morphs together and makes the ugly product that is our existence. But we don’t like that, do we? No. We don’t like watching the overlapped movie, either. It has no aesthetic appeal. It has no logical appeal. It leaves us in a state of confusion, thinking “What the hell was that?” It would get a Rotten Tomatoes score of 0% fresh tomatoes. And who wants that, right?