what scares me most is now

reading this might wreck your life

I was seven years old, and about to go to sleep at my grandparents’ house, when it first hit me. It hit me that because it was now, then, when I was seven, and because it would be now, in the future, when I’d be ninety, there was effectively no gap between the two. That even though we do experience such gaps — the gaps between nows — there’s a terrifyingly real sense in which the now of many days’ time, and equally the now of many decades’ time, is only a split-second away.

I realised that day, at my grandparents’ house, that the gap between seven and ninety would be over any moment, if I was lucky enough to live that long. And that there was nothing I could do about it.

I didn’t know the term ‘indexical’, back then. ‘Now’ is an indexical, like ‘here’ and ‘I’. It’s a word that captures a context it’s tied to, and the referent of which changes dependent on who says it, and the conditions they find themselves in. ‘I’ is different for me and for you, and always will be. ‘Here’ is currently different for me and for you, as it usually is (dependent on how broadly it’s conceived). Whereas, ‘now’ is always the same for me and for you, as long as we both live, but it’s also always changing. It’s always changing because while indexicals are dependent on the context of their usage, this doesn’t mean they aren’t tied to objective truths. Indexicals work because they pick out true things about the world relative to those dependencies: true things about who their user is, where their user is, and so on. I am here now! And you are there.

Nonetheless, ‘now’ feels particularly slippery. This is in spite of it having won some stability — unlike ‘here’ and ‘I’ — from being the same for all of us who exist, at each different point at which we do. I think the following three things play into this slipperiness.

First, the ‘now-ness’ of every single ‘future now’ is yet to come. This makes them particularly hard to get a grip on. Whereas many, if not most, ‘future heres’ will track current ‘here-nesses’. And many ‘future Is’ will track current ‘I-nesses’ (including our cases, I hope).

Second, some people, mostly philosophers — though not me, as you might have realised — believe that time, as commonly conceived, isn’t an objective feature of reality.¹ That is, rather than thinking of time passing as a matter of fundamental truth and as necessary for change to happen (which is what I, and most likely you, believe), they think that if, somehow, everything froze and nothing changed, then time would stop — rather than continuing to tick on, regardless of the freeze.² This way of thinking makes ‘now’ unhinged. Indeed, if you are someone who thinks like that, then technically my piece shouldn’t scare you, though a lot of other stuff should!

Third, any ‘particular now’ is, of course, extremely hard to pick out. I mean, I can describe ‘here’ pretty well: a bookshop cafe with pseudo-industrial decor. I could even tell you its coordinates, if I had a quick look online. And I could come back tomorrow, if I wanted to. Whereas any particular now is simply too fleeting to capture well, if at all. It’s gone. And again. In at least that sense, therefore, it’s hard to think of anything more slippery than ‘now’.

Yet now is what we always experience, even those of us who accept there are different nows. And any second now — less than any second now — I’ll be ninety. And it didn’t help, back when I was seven, that ‘the now problem’ resurfaced in my mind, while playing football at school, two weeks after it first occurred to me. Because, of course, the ‘football now’ felt just the way I knew it would. It felt, that is, as if no time had passed since the now at my grandparents’ house. And it didn’t help that I thought about this problem again and again, every few years. Until, increasingly, I began to think about it every few months. Until I’m sitting here now in the cafe writing about it, because I found myself thinking about it today.

Experiencing different nows has both solidified and tested my fear of now. I mean, I discovered, thanks to different nows, that there was indeed effectively no time between being seven and being 10. And being 10 and being 20. Then, a few weeks ago I turned 40, and it’s still now. So my fear has solidified. But my fear has also been tested, because I’ve sufficiently valued the nows I experienced between seven and 40 — or enough of them, anyway — that I don’t want to throw them away by denying their summation. And even if I hadn’t valued them sufficiently, then I’d still believe that they’d been.

It remains the case, however, that now I’ll be ninety. It’ll be here, and I can’t stop that, and every time I remember it, I feel my mind rushing. If you get what I mean, then I’m sorry. Because it’s the most terrifying thing I know.³

1. If you’re one of these people, you might have taken issue at my claim above about indexicals picking out true things about the world.

2. This is a very rough attempt at explaining, in quick simple terms, two broad positions within an important complex ongoing debate in the philosophy of time. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, and you’d like to, then you might enjoy this SEP entry. I’ll also note here that I’m aware some people might object to what I’ve been saying on some quantum mechanics ground, but I’m happy to set those matters to one side for my current purposes.

3. Thankfully, I increasingly think I’m going to live forever, which helps.