Presence-maxxing
A life worth living
You are wasting your life.
Not because you don’t have time, you do (you are alive). But every day, your time bank account drains 24 hours. Days, weeks, and months slip by, but no closer to a life well lived. Did anything of significance happen in the past day? Week? Month? Why does it feel like you’re not fully living?
Because you aren’t fully living. You fast-forward the only part of the human experience that matters: the present moment. Presence-maxxing—choosing to engage fully in each moment—is the only way out. Spend your time in the moment and experience that nagging, subconscious life-clock fade away.
What are we all doing here?
We all want to live a happy life. Every resource you have should be used in service of that goal. But like money and other resources, we too often get trapped optimizing for the resource itself, rather than figuring out how to use the resource to live a better life.
If you are paying attention, this is obvious: happiness doesn’t correlate strongly with youth. But using time correctly — with presence — does correlate with happiness. Without it, no other factors really matter. Seneca made a similar observation about the preoccupations of our mind robbing us of the moment if we let them:
There will always be causes for anxiety, whether due to prosperity or to wretchedness. Life will be driven on through a succession of preoccupations: we shall always long for leisure, but never enjoy it.
What is a good use of time?
The best heuristic is the simplest: Are you present while doing X? If yes, it is a good use of time. If no, something needs to change.
Our brains are so gigafried by the amount of stimuli modern life comes with: 17 notifications about nothing, loud horns in the street, boss calling you, and a thousand other things placing bids in the attention marketplace. Over time, we’ve trained ourselves to escape rather than engage. The result? You may feel dread about the inevitable passage of time as you get older. But the dread you feel is not because you are losing time, but rather that you are losing time without trading it for fulfilling moments.
How to be more present?
The common solution is to escape by burying the present moment with doomscrolling and the like. But that throws the baby out with the bathwater.
The better solution is presence-maxxing. Optimize your presence by removing these escapes, these fast-forwards of your time. The best example of is how AirPods are used today. Of course, AirPods are useful when augmenting your reality is your intention (like on a video call), but the dangerous usage is the mind-numbing slop that allows you to turn your brain off and escape — music, podcasts, etc. that you aren’t even listening to. AirPods make mindless stimuli so frictionless that you forget you are even using them. I recommend you give those headphones your best Little League impression and throw them into the ocean.
More broadly, there are many examples of distractions — phone notifications, ruminations of the past or future, and anything else that takes up your brainspace, preventing you from being in the here and now. These tools can be useful, but only if used deliberately. If it’s mindless, it needs to go.
You will start to notice that you have been zooming through the best parts of life. The unplanned chats with strangers. The rustling of leaves in a light breeze. The beautiful silence. The deep conversations with friends. There are so many moments, both big and small, that if you truly engage with have meaning to last a lifetime. Don’t miss living these moments with clarity.
There’s no path to a fulfilling life without presence. Fortunately, you already have enough time — you just need to use it wisely. So next time you feel the existential dread creeping in, remember that all you need is now. Slow down, remove the noise, and rediscover the feeling of being alive. Godspeed.