On Accepting our Beautiful, Ugly Present
Walking the line between cynicism and idealism
A person said to me recently that he wants to break through the metaphorical walls before him; they are holding him back from achieving his true potential. Another said to me that he believes there is a world of mental health out there, which he hopes to someday attain. I know others who believe the past was a better place overall, and we should try to return to some of its ways, and still others who believe the future will be far superior. I also know people who hope they are headed for heaven after they die. Then there are the many who believe their lives will be better once they buy that thing, get that job, marry that person, achieve that goal, etc.
What all these seductive beliefs have in common is utopian thinking – seeing a better world “out there”, somewhere, anywhere but here. The word “utopia”, coined by Sir Thomas Moore in his homonymous 1516 book, is drawn from the ancient Greek words for “no” and “where”. Utopias, in the sense of perfect worlds, literally don’t exist, but humans can make worlds that are at least improvements.
Why are humans so clearly drawn to imagining better worlds? Is it simply because we can? Life inevitably is full of hardships, and it’s reassuring to believe that something better is possible? I suspect other animals spend little to no time dreaming about what could be. Is our ability to do this our greatest curse, or our greatest superpower?
Sur la lune
Focusing on an imagined better world tends to take us out of the actual one we’re living right now – if you’re dissatisfied with your present reality, that dissociation is the whole point. I understand some people in extreme poverty, war zones, abusive relationships, or debilitating illness are living truly horrible realities that they need to escape from – if not in physical reality then at least in their minds. But what if your reality is objectively not that bad? What if you have a roof over your head, enough food to eat, a safe society, your health, and some people you care about? Your basic needs met. Put a child in that situation, and chances are that they will be happy. Put an adult, especially a relatively well-off modern adult raised with high expectations for life, and they will more often than not invent a whole lot of things that are “lacking”, which, if they could only fulfill, then they would, at last, live happily ever after.
Every moment spent dreaming of a better world is a moment you’re not living in your actual, real, current world. And our current world is pretty amazing. Consider the uniqueness of this living rock we’re on, hurtling around our star. Its liquid sumptuousness, its caressing breezes, its silken clouds, doing the dance of the seven veils through an azure sky. Consider the billions of years of evolution that has produced the dazzling web of life all around us, and the new kind of animal that is humankind. Consider the thousands of years of slow technological development that has allowed those of us lucky enough to be born in a rich country to lead everyday lives filled with the kind of comfort, power, and interest previously only attained by royalty. We are truly blessed to be alive in this time and place – a reality often forgotten through habituation, and remembered by those who have suffered near-death experiences.
Building a bridge to “no where”
But how did we get here, you ask, to this amazing place, absent some amount of dreaming of a better world?
And how did the Earth move from an inhospitable rock to a breathing biosphere that produces a species that can look back to the Big Bang, smash subatomic particles, and build artificial intelligences that can decode the languages of other lifeforms? Did the Earth have an urge towards “self-improvement”? Is life “better” than no life? Are multi-cellular organisms “better” than single celled ones? Are lifeforms who are more capable of thoughts and feelings and self-consciousness “better”, or at least “more evolved” – like evolution is an arrow pointing in one direction: towards more refinement and complexity? (Maybe the Earth is akin to a single life, one that progresses through birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, and, finally, death. At what stage are we? Are humans the new frontal cortex of the biosphere, just coming in to self-reflection? If so, then is the Earth about three or four in human years? Perhaps the Earth still has a lot of growing up to do. If so, it better get a move on; life has had 3.5 billion years to evolve, and is expected to only have another 1.5 billion or so, before a heating sun burns off the oceans and makes the planet uninhabitable. It might help if the Earth had a parent to help guide it, but as far as we can tell, it seems to be an orphan. The good news is that progress seems exponential; if humankind can manage to not wipe itself out, the next 1.5 billion years should get real interesting. Given that kind of runway, I’ll bet we could even figure out a way to save the Earth from that fiery star death.)
Ultimately, ideas of “better” and “worse” are just human constructs; we have a bad habit of seeing ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, and defining “better” as that which moves closer to ourselves.
At the least we can say that somehow life began on this once sterile planet, and that something compelled that life to move from lesser to greater complexity, for better or worse. Perhaps it is just a simple equation: (struggle to survive and reproduce) x (increasing interactions with other increasingly complex lifeforms) x (time) = greater complexity. Minus the setbacks of mass extinction events.
Then we can say that humans, feeling bored, created art. And feeling hungry, created agriculture. And wanting to better communicate across time and space, created written language. And wanting to do things our bodies couldn’t, created manufacturing. And feeling unsure of our place in the world, created religion and philosophy. And wanting to cure diseases, created medicine. And wanting to organize into larger groups, created government. And wanting a way to get what others have without simply taking it, created economies. And wanting to understand the world and gain power, created science and technology. And wanting to do things our minds couldn’t, created computers. And wanting justice, created social movements.
Not all of these developments were positive. Most are mixed, rife with unintended consequences. But they all began with a wanting, a lacking, that people set out to rectify. They believed a better world was possible, and sometimes sacrificed their present happiness to attain it. Often the fruit of their labours was not seen in their lifetimes. They believed they were making a better world. Like it or not, we stand on their shoulders.
No animal has changed as dramatically as humans have in our short 300,000 year history. And we did so largely because of our ability to imagine a better future – that, and our capacity to carry out those imaginings. If you believe humans are on the whole better off now than 300,000 years ago, then you have to be glad that at least some of us indulged in utopian thinking.
Balancing the sky and the earth
How do you allow your head to peak above the clouds while keeping your feet on the earth? How do you love the present while striving for an even better future? How do you accept yourself while clearly seeing your faults? How do you love others despite all their failings?
There are those who think the world is going to hell; there are those who think it has never been better. The truth is, I think, that the world is simultaneously better than ever, and still needs to be so much better. In other words, we should be grateful for what we have, but never give up improving.
This is a difficult line to walk. Many people fall into the pit of “never enough” – satisfaction is as elusive as finding the end of a rainbow. They are never good enough, or rich enough, and others always disappoint. Baselines shift – what was once considered the goal, once attained, now becomes insufficient, and a higher goal is set. Happiness is always just beyond the horizon. Real life is never as good as it was imagined it would be. The present is a constant disappointment to the past that imagined it, the future a hallowed land of glories.
Others fall the other way, into stagnation, complacency, and a sense that themselves and the world are irredeemable. Unlike the “never enoughers”, these people can at least be happy, if they just want to live a simple, enjoyable life. But if they have any desire to change the world, they are likely to become cynical and embittered in their perceived inability to change anything.
One group will never be happy, no matter how much changes, and the other group just doesn’t believe change is possible. The trick is to be happy with the present, while believing that change is both possible and worthwhile.
If your basic needs are met, chances are that the work you put into improving your lot still further will not be worth it. Studies show, for instance, that past a pretty basic level of income, happiness does not increase much, if at all. Your time would be better spent just enjoying what you have. If you enjoy getting better at something, then by all means do it. But do it because you enjoy it in the moment, not because you think that attaining some mastery will somehow make you happier. Happiness doesn’t need to be earned through pain; it is here, now, free for the taking. Everything is perfectly as it should be, right now.
If you do choose to sacrifice present happiness for some future betterment, for goodness sake do it for others! If you’re doing okay in your life, there are a lot of people who are doing worse than you and could use some help. This simple act will increase your happiness more than focusing on some personal goal (although don’t do it for that reason, do it out of genuine love and empathy). With a little bit of creativity, I’m sure you can find a way to help others that is also doing something you actually enjoy. Win-win!
If you’re imagining a better world, try to keep it grounded in this one. The best approach to spirituality I’ve heard is not the kind that holds up a beautiful metaphysical reality at the expense of our lived physical one, but the kind that uses a literacy in the intangible to further enhance the richness of our embodied selves. Or to give another example: revolutions are rarely anything but destructive, because they try to force too much change too quickly, unmoored from history. While some institutions probably are irreformable, it’s generally better to try to build on what’s already there, and be patient with the degree of change one generation can absorb.
Humans have the unique ability to ignore the beauty all around them, and it’s often failing to see that beauty that drives our “improvements”. But we also have the ability to genuinely make things better, not just for our species but for the flourishing of the Earth as a whole. That latter is in short supply lately, but the potential to return to it still lives within us. Let’s be a species that appreciates the wonderful world we’ve been gifted, and uses our unique powers to make it even better.
What do you do to enjoy the present?
What do you do to improve the future for all beings?