To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

—Bertrand Russell

For good reasons, many thinkers have extolled the benefits of living fully in the present—not wasting time and cognitive energy mired in worries about past events we are unable to change or what the future may bring, striving to maximize the emotional depth, sensory pleasures, and meaningfulness of our living moments as they occur rather than risk dulling or spoiling the rewards to be found in our lived experiences by becoming distracted from them, by failing to notice useful or pleasurable aspects of them, or by introducing into them unfavorable feelings that are not (yet or any longer) relevant to them.

However, we must consider that acknowledging, anticipating, or worrying about the future are feelings that, at least to an extent, are inevitable parts of our present experience. This is true if only for the fact that our brains, which give rise to our conscious experiences, are by design “prediction machines” constantly adapting our feelings and behaviors in anticipation of what may happen next. If this was not the case—if we were entirely absorbed in the present, heedless of what dangers or rewards may await us—our species would have died out long ago.

It follows, then, that concern about the future is not so much something to be avoided entirely but something to be managed and controlled consciously so we may spare ourselves undue suffering—suffering that may ensue from prediction errors or from inappropriate, exaggerated, or premature angst. By considering our predictions and our responses consciously, we may spare ourselves unnecessary suffering as well as free up cognitive resources that may be better used toward maximizing our rewards in and from the present. Put another way: we must strive consciously to find the proper balance between being mindful to and engaged in our experiences as they happen, and giving due consideration to plausible beliefs about the futures (which includes, among other things, consciously denying consideration to implausible predictions and to “catastrophizing”).

To do so, we can’t simply force ourselves to forget about the future. Instead, as meditation teachers have long known, the way to mitigate concerns about irrelevant worries is to first acknowledge and confront our them, consider their relevance in the present, then, when appropriate, choose to detach ourselves emotionally from them and exclude them from our consciousness. If we fail to do so, these concerns will find their way into our consciousness when we are not mindful and manifest in undue anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, or other negative feelings. No doubt, this is easier said than done. Gaining the skill to control our consciousness to such degrees is not innate or intuitive, but it is possible with regular and not-very-time-consuming training in meditation and mindfulness.

To the common rationalization that premature concern about some feared outcome is warranted because these outcomes may be likely and/or severe, it’s worth pointing out that sparing ourselves premature suffering about these outcomes is justified regardless of how plausible or even certain these outcomes may be. Even if we have a high degree of confidence that something bad is about to occur, it is still pointless to allow concern about that thing to deny us pleasure and meaning before it comes to pass. As Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca put it, “He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

Of course, in cases where we may be powerless to preempt undesirable outcomes, denying ourselves contentment, meaning, and pleasures we may otherwise derive from the present by focusing our attention instead on how miserable we believe we’ll be at a later time is—in the strictest sense of the term—a waste of time.

It seems rational that to make good, plausible predictions we must rely on good data and logically sound arguments. Alas, we humans, while capable of rationality, are not innately rational. This is as it should be, since a sense of meaning in life comes from how we feel—our emotions, our passions—not from how successful we are at rational analysis. As philosopher David Hume famously put it, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Still, we must be cognizant of areas where the conscious use of reason, rather than reliance on passion-driven instinct, may lead to greater and more desirable rewards of passion—and mitigate or preempt undesirable ones. Making good predictions is one such area.

Beyond empirical evidence and what vetted wisdom we may already possess, the best data available to us very often come from science. In the pure sense, science is the pursuit of knowledge, distinct from philosophy which is the pursuit of wisdom: science unravels information; philosophy analyzes and contextualizes information. By this I don’t mean the condescending attitude of telling scientists or philosophers or anyone else to “stay in their lane.” What I mean is that one should choose the proper lane to be in for a given task: acquiring data, analyzing data, making decisions based on data, etc. This is because of two reasons. The first: staying within just one lane greatly limits the range of destinations one might reach. Second: different lanes impose different “rules of the road” that must be adhered to if one wishes to avoid undesirable outcomes.

Lest I am misunderstood, the separation I make here between science and philosophy is a conceptual—not a practical—one. In practice, all scientists are to a degree philosophers, all philosophers are to a degree scientists, and all people are—whether formally or informally—at least to some degree, both. (We all accumulate, analyze, and act on information constantly. Still, when you consider these activities as distinct skills that may be evolved and honed with targeted study and training, it becomes easier to see the value of gaining greater insights into science and philosophy as specialized disciplines, in the same way that specialized athletic training may help us perform better at tasks we may already have the capacity to perform.)

So, let’s start with the science—the raw information available to us to draw meaning from and to make decisions by. In the abstract, science has this to say about the future: very soon, this day will be over. Daytime will surrender to nighttime, and nighttime to another day. Seasons will change, years will pass. At some point each of us will say our final farewell. The continents will continue to drift, collide, and subduct, changing the planet’s geography and ecology. Ecosystems will change; evolutionary selection will give rise to new life forms. In about 5 billion years, the sun will exhaust enough of its fuel and lose enough of its mass and gravity that it’s outer edge will begin to expand until it comes close enough to the Earth that solar winds will evaporate all water, and with it all life forms that may remain. Shortly after, the sun will expand further to engulf what remains of the earth itself. Then, the sun will slowly cool down and shrink and eventually become a White Dwarf: a dim, dense core of a star. It will remain in this state for trillions of years.

As these events transpire and long beyond that, the universe will continue to expand until, in about a googol years (a googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes) the universe will becomes so vast, and  matter so widely dispersed, that even atoms will no longer have sufficient energy to bond with each other, if they still exist. There will be no more galaxies, no more stars, no more planets, not even molecules, and certainly no more life.

The above predictions arise from prevailing cosmological models today, most notably a model dubbed Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM), considered the standard mathematical model in cosmology: our best understanding of certain aspects of our universe since its origin in the so-called Big Bang, and the processes guiding its evolution and transformations in time.

Almost a century before ΛCDM, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche penned this prescient account, which, despite some inaccuracies, conveys some of the philosophical points arising from the cold calculations of scientific models such as ΛCDM:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

What are we to make of our ostensible insignificance in the face of what science tells us the future may hold? Or, as the common quip goes, what does it all mean?

One thing we can say with certainty: if we deny facts (scientific knowledge being the closest thing to them available to us), whatever meaning we construct without them is by definition exactly as Nietzsche characterized it: mendacious. As Bertrand Russel admonished passionately:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Objectively, it seems hard to argue that our existence as short-lived biological entities within the very brief span of time in the ongoing evolution of a universe that for most of its existence will not even allow for the formation of individual atoms let alone planets and living beings, is entirely meaningless. Subjectively, however, it is a different story.

In an article titled “Meaning in Life,” psychologist Michael F. Steger offers this definition: “Meaning in life is the set of subjective judgements people make that their lives are (a) worthwhile and significant, (b) comprehensible and make sense, and (c) marked by the embrace or pursuit of one or more highly valued, overarching purposes or missions.” (I took the liberty of italicizing the word “subjective” for emphasis.) The gist of Steger’s definition is this: something is meaningful if it feels meaningful. No further qualification is needed—to have meaning in life, we don’t need to know or even assume the existence of “the meaning of life.”

Before venturing too far into in the philosophical weeds, I’ll bring the focus back to photography. Given the above, I believe the question those of us who consider ourselves as “serious” photographers should ask ourselves is this: knowing the future will come, and that the our work—indeed, our existence—will someday become entirely meaningless in any objective sense, how can we make photography a source of subjective meaning in our lives? Better yet, how can we approach photography so we may reap the greatest and deepest subjective meaning from it?

To be continued…

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