On the morning of 16 November 1973, Buddhist monks carried a body down to Muir Beach and burned it on a wood pyre. The body belonged to Alan Watts, dead at 58 after years of heavy drinking that his friends had watched with growing alarm.
For two decades Watts had preached the single idea that the present moment is the only place a person can live. His 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity argued that to chase the future is “to pursue a constantly retreating phantom,” and that all our anxiety comes from trying to stand outside the current moment and secure the next one.
Millions of readers found the argument liberating. Watts himself could not stay in a moment without a drink in his hand. His lover and editor Jean Burden, who called him one of the most fascinating men she had ever met, finally left because she could not reconcile what she called his moral hypocrisy.
The man who wrote the book on presence could not live there, and he knew it. The destination was real, but the map was wrong.
The past, the present and the future
You may have heard that if you are depressed you are living too much in the past, and that anxiety comes from thinking too much about your future. Peace can only be accomplished by being in the present.
The observation feels ancient, and in fairness, part of it is. Blaise Pascal wrote in the 1650s that we wander in times that are not ours, that the present is never our goal, and that as a result “we never live, but we hope to live.” We tell children to wait until they are old enough to understand. We tell ourselves to wait until the mortgage is paid off and the retirement account has enough in it.
Pascal saw the disease clearly but he never claimed that depression lives at one end of the timeline and anxiety at the other, and that moving to the middle cures both. That warning is new and the evidence says it is wrong – in a useful way.
Elsewhere but here
In 2010 Harvard psychologists published a study in Science built on an iPhone app that pinged 2,250 people at random moments and asked 3 questions:
Across roughly 250,000 sampled moments, people’s minds were somewhere other than their current activity nearly 50% of the time. Mind-wandering stayed above 30% during every single activity they measured (except making love).
The finding was that where the mind went predicted happiness better than what the body was doing, and that drifting off to pleasant topics left people no happier than staying put. The researchers compressed it into one sentence:
“A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
Their analysis suggested the wandering caused the unhappiness rather than the reverse, though they were careful to flag that as a strong clue and not a verdict.
Half a life, spent elsewhere. And the elsewhere is expanding, because we have industrialised it. Whenever we feel bad, uncertain or restless, the phone comes out, and we no longer wait for anything.
“All the breaks have disappeared. The breaks used to be where the fun happened and where reflection lived. Now the pauses are gone and we have become uneasy in silence.”
Nobody stole the present from us. We hand it over, roughly every 6 minutes, voluntarily.
The map fails in both directions
In 2016 Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, published Homo Prospectus arguing that our species is misnamed. What humans do best is not knowing but anticipating, and depression is above all a disease of the imagined future. In a companion paper, Ann Marie Roepke and Seligman review evidence that depressed people simulate fewer positive futures, believe more strongly in bleak ones, and that hopelessness about the future predicts suicidality better than global measures of despair. The depressed person is not stuck in the past. She is stuck with a future she cannot picture wanting.
Meanwhile the past turns out to be medicine. Constantine Sedikides has spent two decades running experiments on nostalgia, and his research programme keeps finding the same pattern. Deliberately revisiting warm memories raises meaning in life, social connectedness, and self-esteem, and it works best for people in distress. One series of studies found that induced nostalgia increases optimism about the future.
The future performs the same trick in reverse. When Jeroen Nawijn and colleagues tracked 1,530 Dutch adults through a holiday season in 2010, vacationers were measurably happier than non-vacationers, but the boost showed up almost entirely before the trip. Anticipation carried the happiness, the beach itself barely moved the needle, and 8 weeks after returning nothing remained. A large share of a vacation’s total joy is consumed in advance months before departure.
The past holds both nostalgia and rumination, the compulsive replaying of wounds that predicts and prolongs depressive episodes. The future holds both planning and worry, both the saved-for house and the rehearsed catastrophe. Even trauma follows this logic. A flashback is not a person visiting the past but the past forcing itself into the present tense, uninvited.
What separates the healthy from the harmful is never the direction of travel. It is whether you are travelling or being dragged.
Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford prison experiment fame, spent his later career measuring exactly this. His Time Perspective Inventory sorts people along 5 orientations, and the profile that best predicts wellbeing is not maximal presence. It is a balanced portfolio:
People who score high on pure present orientation without the rest do not become monks. They become impulsive, and in Zimbardo’s data they crash more cars.
Don’t “live in the present” and stay there forever. What helps is being able to visit the past warmly, look forward to the future with some hope, and still enjoy what’s happening right now. All three at once, please.
The presence economy
The global market for meditation apps reached roughly 2.2 billion dollars in 2025, with Calm ranking as the highest-grossing meditation app worldwide. Watts sold the present moment in paperback. His heirs sell it as a subscription, ideally consumed through a device we cannot put down.
But the evidence behind the products are thin. When researchers reviewed 17,801 citations for a 2014 meta-analysis, only 47 trials survived their quality screen, and mindfulness programmes showed effect sizes of 0.22 to 0.38 for anxiety and depression, modest number, with no evidence that meditation beat exercise, medication or other active treatments.
This is not a case against meditation. Effect sizes near 0.3 are respectable and plenty of accepted therapies do no better. However, it is a case against presence being a safe place and that an app can move you there. Watts saw this trap from the inside. A present moment pursued as a goal can become one more future to chase, one more retreating phantom, now with a renewal fee.
How to stop travelling by accident
Tolstoy got closer to the workable version in 1885, in a short story called The Three Questions. A king announces a reward for anyone who can answer three of them: the right time to begin every action, the right people to attend to, and the most necessary task. His scholars contradict one another, some prescribing detailed schedules drawn up years in advance, others councils of advisers, others magicians. So the king dresses as a commoner and climbs to the hut of a frail hermit, who listens to the questions, says nothing, and goes on digging his vegetable beds, wheezing with every push of the spade. The king watches for a while, then takes the spade from the old man and digs for him. One hour passes, then another. Toward sunset a stranger staggers out of the wood with blood pouring from a wound in his stomach, and the king washes it and bandages it, changing the soaked dressing again and again until the bleeding stops, and falls asleep on the threshold, spent.
In the morning the stranger confesses. He is an old enemy who had lain in ambush to kill the king on his way home. The bodyguard found him first and wounded him, and the man he came to murder spent the night keeping him alive. He swears lifelong loyalty. When the baffled king asks the hermit one last time for his answers, the hermit tells him he already has them. Had he not pitied an old man and stayed to dig, he would have walked into the ambush. So the digging was the right time, the hermit was the right person, and the wound was the most necessary task. There is only one time that matters, the hermit says, because it is “the only time when we have any power.”
Read the story once more and notice what the king never does in it. He never savours the moment. He never watches his breath or lets his thoughts drift by like clouds. He digs, and he presses cloth against a wound until the blood stops coming. Tolstoy’s present is not a beach chair but a workbench, and the story’s twist turns on exactly that: the future the king was so desperate to secure, an assassination he knew nothing about, got handled as a by-product of giving his full attention to whatever was in front of his hands.
A story I keep in my files makes the same point in modern dress. Marcus A. Nelson, writing in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, describes trudging home through a New York heat wave after botching the biggest presentation of his career, boiling in the three-piece suit he had bought for the occasion and determined to marinate in the failure the whole way. A block from his building, a boy of about 5 stood by an open fire hydrant, water gun lowered, and dared him with his eyes. The boy’s older brother tossed Nelson a water cannon, and within minutes the block was at war, water balloons falling from upstairs windows, an elderly neighbour wheeling out her cart to hand mango ices to combatants of every age, the ruined suit soaked through, Nelson laughing harder than he could remember laughing. The botched presentation belonged to the past and the career damage to the future. The water gun was in his hands. He pulled the trigger.
This is the correction the evidence has been pointing to all along, and it explains why the slogan fails even where the science half-works. “Live in the present” is advice about residence, and residence is a losing game: the Harvard numbers say even the motivated tenant is elsewhere nearly half the time, and Britton’s data show that straining to hold the position can hurt. Advice about action asks for something humbler and more repeatable. You are not required to stay in the present, only to return to it, again and again, whenever something in front of you needs your hands, your eyes, or your full weight. The 6 practices below are built for that returning. Think of them less as meditation and more as the hermit’s spade: small, concrete acts that convert attention into contact with what is here. None requires a cushion or a subscription.
1. Do the dish in front of you
Thich Nhat Hanh’s instruction in The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975) was to wash the dishes to wash the dishes, not to get them done. The Killingsworth data explains why this works: happiness tracked attention to the current task more than it tracked the task itself, so full attention upgrades even dull activities. The writer Ryan Holiday tells a story on himself that captures how alien this has become. In a swimming pool with his wife, he kept proposing activities, laps, rafts, cleaning the filter, until she said, “You know, you can just be in the pool.” Pick one daily task this week, dishes, the walk to the station, the first coffee, and do only that while doing it. Ten minutes. Phone in another room, since the phone is where the other 46.9% lives.
2. Say the Vonnegut sentence out loud
Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle Alex had a rule: whenever things were pleasant, drinking lemonade under a tree in summer, he would interrupt the moment to say, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” Vonnegut urged his audiences to adopt the habit, and the research agrees with the uncle. Fred Bryant, who built the psychology of savoring over three decades at Loyola, found that pleasure attended to is pleasure amplified: naming a good moment while it happens intensifies it now and strengthens the memory you will draw on later. The moments qualify on their own terms, not on grandeur. One muggy morning walking our dog, I caught the sunlight coming through the leaves as a series of small overlapping circles on the pavement, each one an image of the sun itself, cast for free, without fanfare. Saying the sentence, even silently, was the difference between having seen that and having walked past it.
3. Give worry an office
Since the future will keep breaking in regardless, schedule it. The technique comes from Thomas Borkovec’s lab in the early 1980s and survives in modern CBT as stimulus control for worry: set a fixed 15-minute window each day, and when a worry arrives outside office hours, write it down in one line and tell it to come back at the appointed time. Most worries fail to show up for their own meeting. The point is not suppression, which backfires, but containment, and it works with your prospective nature instead of against it: planning gets a desk, catastrophising loses its all-access pass.
4. Visit the past on purpose
Sedikides’ nostalgia findings convert directly into practice. Once a week or so, open the photo archive, play the album from a summer that mattered, retell an old family story at the dinner table. The dosage instruction is what separates this from rumination: nostalgia is a visit you choose, with a door you can walk back out of, while rumination is a loop that chooses you. If you arrive at a memory and find yourself prosecuting a case instead of warming your hands, leave, and go do exercise 1.
5. Plant something to look forward to
Nawijn’s vacation data implies a cheap trick: since anticipation carries most of the happiness, manufacture more of it. Book the small trip 2 months out instead of 2 weeks out. Put the dinner with old friends in the calendar now for March. Order the book that publishes in the autumn. You are not escaping the present when you do this. You are seeding future presents and collecting the interest immediately, which is what a healthy future orientation looks like in Zimbardo’s balanced profile.
6. Collect garbage time
Jerry Seinfeld, asked about spending quality time with his 3 children, told the New York Times Magazine he wanted the opposite: “I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time.” Watching a kid read a comic book, cereal at 11 p.m. The Seahawks coach Pete Carroll gives the same advice to people with impossible schedules: find the moments between moments. The reason this counts as a presence practice is arithmetic. Paul Graham worked it out after having children, in his essay Life Is Short: “You only get 52 weekends with your 2-year-old,” and if Christmas feels magical between ages 3 and 10, you get to watch that 8 times. Quality time waits for conditions. Garbage time is available now, in the car, at the gate of a delayed flight, in the queue, and it is where children say the true sentences anyway.
The tent
One warm evening many years ago, I put up a tent in the garden with my oldest daughter. She was 4. We lay outside first, looking at the stars, listening to the wind move through the leaves, after 4 years in which I had spent nearly every waking hour with her, the sickness and the screaming and the walks included. Late that night, just before she fell asleep, I whispered in her ear the one sentence I most needed her to have. She smiled, the kind of smile that pulls one out of you in return, and answered:
“When I’m seventy-five and I think about my life and what it was like to be young, I hope that I can remember this very moment.”
A few seconds later she was asleep, and the only sound in the tent was her breathing.
Look at what her sentence does. It stands squarely inside the moment, feeling it. It reaches 70 years into the future without a trace of dread. And it reaches back toward the present from that imagined distance, filing the now away as a treasure worth carrying. Past, present, and future in a single breath, each one making the others brighter, which is roughly what Zimbardo’s balanced scale tries to measure and what the fake Lao Tzu quote, with its sealed borders between time zones, cannot even describe.
Alan Watts never found that balance. The man who wrote that living for the future means missing the point everlastingly spent his last years fleeing the present at speed, and, his son later discovered, planned his own ending with meticulous care. His wife recorded the last teaching he gave her: “The secret of life is knowing when to stop.” On Muir Beach the monks had the fire burning by 8:30 in the morning.
In the tent, nobody was chasing the present, and nobody was fleeing it either. My daughter travelled freely across 70 years and landed exactly where she lay. She was 4 years old, and no one had yet told her which time zone to live in.
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