When our minds are tormented by events from the past, it impacts our daily lives.
It is difficult to live normally when an event from the past has such a deep impact that it paralyzes us.
Why are we like this? Why does a hurtful event from the past prevents us from living our life now? This is the first question.
On the other hand, we constantly worry about the future. We often don’t pay attention to what is here and now because we are thinking about things that can go wrong. Why are we like this? Why does something that has not yet happened prevents us from living our life now? This is the second question.
In this article, we will look at the second question. In a future article, we will examine the first one.
The deep-rooted, DNA level programming of our worry about the future can be traced back to millions of years ago as humankind evolved in forests, hunting and gathering food and surviving day by day. Hunt for food was necessary to nourish the body and quench the hunger. But hunting came with dangers of the mortal kind - they could be killed by a vicious animal while they were out and about searching for food. Therefore, there were two sides to the act of hunting: on the one side, there was food that satisfied a daily need; on the other, the possibility of death. However, these two sides were not in balance. If there was no food one day, it was not the end of the world. They drank water and went to sleep hungry. They will probably find food the next day. On the other hand, if they died while hunting, that was the very end of their existence. Because of this lopsided impacts, they learned to worry way much more about the possibility of death tomorrow than being happy about the food they got today.
Later, when humankind learned to cultivate and settle down in agricultural farms, they quickly learned that a bad rain season can result in low or no harvest. This meant scarcity of food the next season. So they turned anxious about the weather and the anticipation of rain. Once again, the worry about the possibility of drought overwhelmed the happiness of food on the table today.
This type of training of our neural networks over millennia has been programmed in our DNAs, passed down generation after generation since the days of hunting and harvesting. We don’t have tigers or droughts to fear now, at least not directly in our urban lives. But, the tigers and droughts of yester-years have multiplied and scaled to thousands of mini tigers and droughts! Am I dressed well? What will those who see me on the street think about me? What if it rains and my make-up is ruined? Does this dress make me appear too fat? What will my boss think about the report I submitted? Will I get promoted? Will the product launch be successful? What if she doesn’t like me? and so on and on. The possibilities for catastrophe are endless, and they are only limited by our imagination!
To be clear, these questions are not unimportant. They are, when we consider them deliberately, as part of planning for something. The trouble is that they arise out of nowhere, seemingly at random, without our permission or forethought. THIS is the issue. The worry of a future mishap that comes out of nowhere is the problem. It hijacks our attention and we are GONE, down a rabbit hole that is not of our creation or intent.
There are two fundamental issues with this type of attention hijacking. First, it is paralyzing and prevents us from living, because living by definition is paying attention to and enjoying the present moment. That is all we have, not the future moment we are dreading, as that has not happened yet. Second, it is the opposite of freedom. Freedom is often associated with the ability to do anything we want. This means not being under the control of someone or something else. Alas, this freedom is relinquished when the pondering over a future calamity takes over our attention.
In other words, we are neither living nor are we free under the thumb of this ever-present worry about the future, which has been programmed into our DNAs over millennia.
This is not our fault. But how do we deal with this?