The Truth of the Moment
It’s not often that we stop to appreciate the moment. As a habit we spend our time dwelling in the muddled memories of the past, gazing into the hazy world of imagination that we use to represent future, or tangling ourselves in webs of thoughts that control our attention and paint context onto the world.
All the while, the actual substance of life is to be found elsewhere. In terms of our conscious experience itself, there is no past, no future, just the now.
You can experience this for yourself. Stop what you’re doing and sit back. Relax, breathe gently and notice the sensations of your breath. Look around at the spectrums of shadow and color that are adopting the shape of your environment; feel the sensations of your legs, your arms, your chest; hear the sounds and smell the aromas drifting in the air around you. Try to notice any thoughts, feelings or emotions in your mind. So far as you can, see these swirling cognitions simply as objects floating in awareness; as existing alongside the sights, sounds and sensations of your physical environment instead of obscuring them.
The more deeply we are able to drop back into this sort of awareness, the better we can perceive the continuum of experience as it exists behind the cognitive webs of the mind. In dividing this continuum into units of moments, we can then understand a moment as a fundamental unit of conscious perception. 1It may be helpful to think of the continuum of experience as uncountable infinity and moments as the units we’ve devised to make some sense of it.
In this context, the entirety of our experience is a steady march of finite, individual moments, one after the other. When we pay attention, we realize that the moment is all that’s truly there. This is the truth of the moment.
The Story of Identity
Perhaps most interesting about the truth of the moment is that, despite our ability to quite easily confirm it for ourselves, we often design our lives around priorities that don’t perfectly correspond to it.
Take a business man, for example, who works for a company whose mission he does not share in a role that he does not particularly enjoy. In doing so, he is curiously willing to trade a substantial amount of his finite supply of moments for pieces of paper that can be exchanged for various goods and services. This activity might be justified were he to then re-invest the money in curating positive experience, but he often does not do so. His priority can very well be to simply gather wealth for the sake of wealth itself.
For an objective party, it would likely be difficult to understand how such a misalignment between effort and return is not only possible, but common amongst a species who appear to possess the capacity to behave otherwise. For fellow humans, however, it is easy to understand the what might be going on in the business man’s mind.
Each of us is, after all, a master story teller. On top of the austere, naked reality of the world we have built a whole other universe by the means of our collective minds. This is our great evolutionary advantage. It’s what allowed us to rise above the game of the natural world and create whole new games of our own. 2 An excellent Ted talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzj7Wg4DAbs&t=3s&ab_channel=TED It’s an advantage that was, in evolutionary terms, unsurmountable. If it weren’t for our sensibilities and enduring reliance on the fruits of nature, we could annihilate it with only a relatively small effort.
On the crest of this great impetus, our minds became ever more wired to craft stories and use them to define and understand the world. Evidence for this abounds in our modern lives; consider, for example, the strange power story telling has in communication and memory.
Like so many traits that served us well in this first and most fundamental game of life and death, however, our penchant for living foremost in the infrastructure of our imagination can all too easily lead to suboptimal gameplay in the contemporary world.
Our very favorite story – that of our personal identity – is the character we imagine to be playing the game of our lives. As we guide this character through the levels of life, we borrow the measures of its success from vast networks of belief systems. 3in the western world, these are often systems of money, career and social status, though there is great diversity in the narratives into which we weave our sense of self.
We are, as a default, lost. The addict is lost in the story of pleasure; the lawyer in the story of law and justice; the Christian in the story of God; the athlete in the story of glory; the business man in the story of gold.
It’s worth noting that our tendency towards narrative immersion is not in and of itself a guarantee of unskillful life design. The issue is that a story, due to the purely cognitive nature of its existence, need not be grounded in objective reality – in fact, many of our most popular stories are not. This is why humans, as concious beings, can spend their whole lives pursuing objectives that don’t actually enrich the quality of concious experience. At the end of the game, then, they have become expert accumulators of many things – but not that thing which, ultimately, matters most.
The good news is that the very mind responsible for the obfuscation of the truth of the moment can be also be used to both discover and leverage it. Once realized, the power of the narrative mind can be used to play the game with a skill inaccessible to any other species.
As will be seen, the end of such a life will not be material wealth, fame or social status, but rather the only good that is objectively and universally worth accumulating.
The Math of Moments
Layered on top of each moment is an experiential valance … the sum of all aspects of a given moment works out to either a net positive or a net negative; good or bad; peace or suffering. The math of moments is the philosophy that our foundational goal ought to be maximizing the number of positive moments in our life and minimizing the number of negative ones.
This can be thought of as accumulating moment “wealth” – that is, a lifetime of positive experience. One designing their life with the math of moments can use this metric as a measure of its success:
sum(positive moments) – sum(negative moments) = net moment wealth
The more moment wealth you have at the end of the game of self (i.e. at the end of your life), the better you have played the game. The beauty of this lies both its simplicity and objectivity; we would be hard pressed to find an easier or more verifiable way to measure a good life.
However, while the objective itself (after recognition of the truth of the moment) presents little resistance to comprehension, how to go about achieving it is much less intuitive.
One spurious conclusion in particular that seems to follow from this reasoning is that one should always “live in the moment” — that is, seek comfort and pleasure and avoid negative experiential valance on a moment to moment basis. If our ultimate goal is to accumulate net moment wealth, though, seeking simply to avoid negative moments turns out to be bad math.
We know that our subjective experience will move linearly along the entire collection of moments in our lives. Instead of seeking to maximize any individual moment, then, we should seek to maximize them in the aggregate. In this sense, accumulating moment wealth is analogous to accumulating material wealth; in order to do this optimally, we must invest and let our interest compound over time.
To illustrate this point, we can simplify things by shrinking the game to the scope of a day and looking at two scenarios with very different end balances of moment wealth.
Scenario 1: Moment Investment
Consider a very unpleasant way to start a cold winter day: waking up at the crack of dawn, blearily layering up to fight the bitter cold, and then hitting the dark and snowy streets for a hilly run. The overall net moment wealth of such a morning is quite likely going to be negative (or at least our minds will insist that it will be). In addition, consistent execution of such a run may require sacrifices of pleasant experience like happy hour with friends or binging a Netflix series the night before, seeming to only compound the negative moment balance of the activity.
This begs the question – why should one with a finite number of precious moments spend any amount of them so uncomfortably? Are those who would undertake such an activity simply delusional (or perhaps even masochistic)?
This question hinges on an incomplete analysis. Early morning exercisers are very much the opposite of delusional. To understand why, it is useful to think of them as moment investors.
Since wealth in this scenario is accumulated not on a moment for moment basis, but rather over cumulatively over a period of time, it must be taken into account that the day does not end after the run. This leads to the insight that the undertaking of short-term discomfort has had a direct effect on proceeding moments: the moment investor has more energy, more motivation and more verve with which to attack problems. Her body feels better, her brain works better and her confidence in herself is high. These are dividends that can then be reinvested as she encounters challenges in the day that must be faced anyway, a concept summarized eloquently by Ray Dalio in Principals:
Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.
When investing in the traditional sense, short-term gains (like purchasing a new car) are resisted and painful feelings (like surrendering hard-earned cash to a volatile stock market) are overcome in order to achieve growth of principal in the long run. So too in moment investing. By being strategic in her allocation of moments, the moment investor achieves a positive moment balance overall.
Scenario 2: Frivolous Moment Spending
Importantly, moment spending is not always moment investing. Frivolous moment spending can be thought of as the attempt to purchase positive experience with moments that provide immediate returns of pleasure and comfort. The same vices that underly fiscally irresponsible financial habits often apply here as well, and that leads us to making short-sighted, impulsive moment spending decisions.
On that same, cold winter morning, one in the habit of frivolous moment spending might, for example, recruit the snooze button in the battle with his alarm, grasping at the the brief moments of comfort derived from turning over in a warm bed.
When he finally does get up, cold, groggy and resentful at coming to the end of the snooze-hitting moments of comfort, he will likely start the day in a bad mood. When it comes time for breakfast, he succumbs quickly to the temptation of eating something high in sugar or simple carbs, which, as promised by his lesser intuitions, temporarily shifts the experiential balance back in a positive direction.
Such a success quickly reveals itself as transitory, however. After brief moments of comfort during and after the meal, the inevitable sugar crash will drag his energy and mood back downwards, suspending him again in a field of negative experiential valance.
Worse still, this morning has a snowball effect on the rest of the day. Our frivolous moment spender will be more likely to take the elevator instead of the stairs, succumb to distractions instead of concentrating on work and make the same gamble for fleeting return through comforting food at lunch, starting the unfortunate cycle anew.
Moment spending of this sort leads to a chain of decision making that compounds negative experiential valence. Seemingly inexpensive decisions at the start of the day have thus grown into a damning price tag as measured by the math of moments.
When the books are balanced, the moment investor in scenario one and the frivolous moment spender in scenario two have starkly different net worths. Considered consequentially, it is clear that simply avoiding unpleasant experience is no way to achieve a healthy daily balance of moment. To do this well, we must instead become savvy investors of our time, which, in turn, calls for a subduing of primitive tendencies and intuitions.
Further, our lives are, of course, not played out in the course of a day, and our days are not independent from one another. Daily decision making evolves slowly but surely into overarching habits and patterns of behavior. Similarly, daily moment wealth balances can compound into either great moment wealth or great moment wealth deficit. That means that our approach to this fundamental problem has profound effects on our careers, our health, our living circumstances and – most importantly – the overall quality of our aggregate experience.
Thus, before one dives into the details of how to live his life, he ought to first seek to understand this calculus and, in doing so, ensure that he’s aimed correctly. He who fails in this runs the very real risk of falling into the depths of the truest form of poverty.
The Ultimate Rule
No matter the story, eventually all erodes away in the desert of time. Think of poor Ozymandias, who tried to defeat this inevitability:
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
As important as stories of legacy, identity, or material wealth may seem, we don’t take them with us, and nothing we create can withstand the gradual erosion of time. This is the ultimate rule of the game of self. While this doesn’t mean that traditional objectives are not worthwhile, it does mean that their worth can be directly measured by the extent to which they correlate with accumulating moment wealth. Moment wealth is the true, ultimate good; the good by which all other goods can be measured and which, in turn, is good for its own sake.
Indeed, in the end we have nothing but the total number of moments in our lives and, if we’re lucky, the ability to influence the quality of them. For those of us with this great fortune, whether we conclude our lives rich or poor will be principally determined by how well we are able to design our lives with the math of moments.
With this measuring stick, the Game of Self can begin.
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