Why moving on feels like moving backwards.
It was late on a cold, dark, December night. I was sitting in my friend’s car, still getting used to the heated seats. We were having one of those deep conversations while he was driving. I can’t remember the exact words (and I’m struggling to think of a more vegan-friendly metaphor) but he said some platitude to the effect of “there are plenty of fish in the sea”.
I knew he was right. I agreed wholeheartedly. I’m sure countless humans have thought ‘woe betide me’ about their love lives and turned out to be wrong, and hell if I have the arrogance to think I or my situation was in any way special, or the stupidity to make the same mistake.
Where I did disagree, was in the emotional response. I wasn’t sad, it’d been well over a year by that point and I was on the whole, quite happy. Like the Scottish Highlands, deep conversations have their highs, lows and a few morose clouds, and I was struggling to articulate why his words didn’t make me feel better.
“Yes, but I can only see that one!” I said, palms open and arms stretched towards the darkness beyond the headlights.“It’s like…”, I paused. “It’s like I’m driving a car, backwards. I only know I’ve missed something until it’s too late. The best I can do is check the mirrors every so often.”
A couple of weeks later, I was speaking to a lady in a Buddhist monastery about that idea, and she was telling me about some work she’d done in a very different culture (she did mention what one, I just can’t remember its name). She was part of a group of people visiting, and was doing a culture-exchange presentation-exercise-thing. Everyone (locals and visitors) was asked to close their eyes and point to the future. When they opened their eyes, all the locals were pointing backwards and all the visitors were pointing forwards. And the explanation for pointing backwards: you can’t see the future.
The future is behind you because you can’t see it. A simple idea, with a profound effect. In one logical judo-flip it clarified why I felt so emotionally attached to the past and unattached to the future.
Because, up until that point, I was confused. Both the past and future are outside of my control, and therefore belong in the category of indifferents. Logically, I should feel the same about them: neither desirous, nor averse. However, emotionally, I cherished that bit of my past and dismissed that bit of my future. And I struggled to pin down exactly what it was that I didn’t understand about myself.
Different cultures think about and express time differently. What you study, and your current circumstances (short-term visits or long-term stays) also influence your conceptualisation of time. Differences in how we think about time can lead to ambiguities. The physics of time is a genuine puzzle, and according to some Buddhists (p. 215), time is simply a mental formation.
I think it is worthwhile to think about these sorts of ideas briefly (without straying too far into poisoned arrow territory). So below are a couple of changes to how one can view time, and the potential benefits of doing so for each.
Ever since I’ve reframed my thinking around this principle, not only have I understood and lessened my attachment to the past, I’ve become a lot calmer and more forgiving of myself.
Calmer is perhaps the more surprising one; let me elaborate. I’ve become calmer because I’ve accepted that I do not and cannot know what the future holds for me. Will I regret quitting my job? Should I go home while there are still flights, or stay in a foreign country? Will I ever move on? My mind is susceptible to taking the worst case answers to questions like these and feeling, in the present, as if it’s already happened. As playwright, Roman Senator and philosopher Seneca puts it: “we suffer more often in our imagination than in reality”.
Accepting that I don’t and can’t know the future isn’t to say that I don’t plan ahead — quite the opposite, I think it becomes all the more pertinent to plan options, backups and contingencies because you don’t know which of many potential outcomes is going to befall you. What I try to avoid doing now, is assuming that a particular, unpleasant scenario is fixed. And this cuts both ways — you also need to plan for success and elation, so you’re not caught off-guard and remain grounded.
However, even with the best of intentions and planning, one can’t predict everything, all the time. My wildest premeditatio malorum wouldn’t have put me in New Zealand for a whole year when I’d only intended to stay for two weeks and had packed for a month.
And this is where being more forgiving of myself comes in. In such instances, we can fool ourselves into thinking, ‘we should have seen it coming’ because of our implicit assumption that the future is ahead of and moving towards, us. Just as much you wouldn’t blame yourself if you got hit in the back of the head with a rouge projectile, (or congratulate yourself if you accidentally dodged it without realising) you shouldn’t blame (or congratulate) yourself for having to face (or avoid) something you didn’t, and can’t, see coming.
A corollary of this way of thinking is illustrated quite nicely in the movie Tenet (if you don’t want minor spoilers, skip to the next section now). The movie mostly makes sense during the first half, but there are things your brain just isn’t used to processing about people and cars moving backwards. It is only once the protagonist inverts himself does the story begin to make sense and unravel, answer the questions the audience has. And I think similarly, some of the stories of our lives may only make sense when we watch them in reverse.
As much as I’ve been enamoured with my driving-backwards analogy and the benefits it has brought me, depending on the context, it has a flaw: egocentricity. And yes, it is deeply ironic that I didn’t realise this while I was at the (Buddhist!) monastery.
Contrast the driving-backwards perspective with the following. Time is running out. Always. Every second, every day, death is moving closer to you. Although we might colloquially say the converse, if you think about it, this is closer to reality. Saying “I am moving closer to death” almost makes it sounds like I have any control over the matter and that if I did, I chose to move towards death. Both of which, are complete nonsense.
Psychologists call these two perspectives ‘Moving Ego’ and ‘Moving Time’. A small body of evidence is revealing some surprising links between such abstract perspectives and concrete behaviour.
One link is to conscientiousness and procrastination: a study concluded that “participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective were more likely to exhibit conscientious behaviors, while those who adopted the Moving Ego perspective were more likely to procrastinate”. In particular, they showed that those who adopted a Moving Time perspective, on average, did things earlier (arrive for the bus or an appointment, submit an assignment before the deadline) than those who adopted a Moving Ego perspective.
Another link is to anger. If you’re a Hindu or a Buddhist, this should come as little surprise (I’ll leave why for a future article). The basic psychological mechanism is that the abstract concepts of anger and Moving Ego both “share an approach-related spatial representation”, revealing a “a novel bi-directional link between the seemingly unrelated but similarly embodied abstract domains”. Basically if you are primed to think about you moving through time, then that activates the same area of the brain when you move towards an irritant you want to deal with, increasing anger (the converse is also possible).
Anger is a specific manifestation of agency, and it’s the only negative one. And so, even though it is counter-intuitive, you’d also expect a third link between perspective on time and the positive effects of agency, such as happiness.
Results provide bidirectional evidence for an ego-moving representation of time, with happiness eliciting more agentic control, and evidence for a time-moving passivity associated with emotional experiences of anxiety and depression.
However, in all the studies above, the events being considered were neutral. When the event is not neutral, the story gets a bit more complicated.
Anger is probably the only exception to the rule that people generally move towards things they desire and away from things to which they are averse. This rule also applies in how we think about past and future, pleasant and unpleasant events. Thinking of an unpleasant past event, or a pleasant future event, prompts a Moving Ego perspective. Thinking of a pleasant past event, or an unpleasant future event, prompts a Moving Time perspective. A bit of agency can shorten how long you think someone else will grieve for and increase happiness.
With this bit of information we can delineate the two common reactions to the Stoic idea of memento mori, which primes one to adopt a Moving Time perspective. If one assumes that death is an unpleasant event, then that would explain a passive, morbid, nihilistic reaction to the idea. If one assumes that death is an indifferent, that would explain acting with focus, gratitude and of course, zest.
So, according to the research, there’s no one universally useful way to think about time passing. Are you feeling passive or sad? Try a Moving Ego perspective: you’ll get through this. Are you feeling angry? Try a Moving Time perspective: don’t rush into anything. Do you get carried away or impatient anticipating a pleasant event? Trying a Moving Time perspective: you can’t make it happen sooner. As the authors of the happiness paper also say:
This bidirectional relationship suggests that our representation of time is malleable, and therefore, current emotional experiences may change through modification of time representations.
As I’m wrapping this up, I get the feeling that that the research has missed a couple of questions here. What is the relationship between behaviour and where you perceive the future to be? Is it possible to retain the benefits of Moving Time, by changing how an event is judged, without conceding to its potential downsides?
I found it interesting to to meditate on these ideas whilst writing this, but having considered it all, I personally prefer the simplicity of sticking to Moving Time — in my mind, it seems right, doesn’t have to impact my agency (thanks to the Dichotomy of Control) and is in line with other things like memento mori and अनित्य (anitya, impermanence).