lives, ideas we forgot

an unprofessional rumination on the past, memory and emancipation

Now Only

In a conversation with a friend recently, they talked about how people are stuck in the past or the future: drowning in nostalgia or lethargic from the endless possibilities and problems that await them—when they effectively don’t matter. Your memories aren’t really happening, and your future is not real. What truly matters is what concerns you in the present, the stuff you’re going to do the next hour, the next minute, and the next second.

I can’t help but agree with this sentiment, which troubles me more than anything. The idea is very intuitive—what you can see and feel is the real thing, nothing else matters—but it’s exactly that bluntness that makes me uneasy. For sure, things outside of your immediate senses do matter, right? The past matters, history matters, the future matters, and we should operate in consideration of these things.

At the same time, the past can be a horrible beast that traps you in an image of yourself that you feel like you must live up to or escape from. Memories are inherently distorted by our present perception of them, rationalized and narrativized in whatever way our current vibes are inclined to do. That’s not even mentioning nostalgia, which is so commonly understood as a pastiche illusion, but also an indulgence so incredibly powerful that nobody can actually, fully reject it. The future is absolutely crushing, both in the sense that I don’t want to get the fuck up the next morning, and in the tide of the world, which never seems to stop trending towards literal global disaster.

People can be, by all means, stuck in the past and paralyzed by the future. So, I can imagine many people benefiting from a present-focused mindset—for example, me. I took it even further, in fact. For a long time, I pretty much forced myself to identify with fatalism (making this the second time in a row that I’ve mentioned it in one of these writings)—the idea that every single decision I’ve made up until this point was how fate wanted it, and the version of myself that exists right now is the only possible one, and that whatever the future holds is out of my control. That was the only way I could move forward in my regrets and self-loathing. In general, in a world constantly at information overload, I think people are starting to value being in the moment more. I’d argue that music is such an effective, universal art form because of the spontaneity in it. Yes, some psychos do speed up and slow down songs, but nevertheless, music is supposed to be consumed in congruence with the passage of time, with all the sensations hitting you and leaving you in real time. We miss that in our everyday lives, filled with so much noise and uncertainty.

So, it’s undeniably good to just focus on the now, right? I don’t know. I’m a self-proclaimed artist on days when I don’t hate myself, and my job is not to optimize the human experience but to observe and make something out of it. Memories are how we process ourselves, how we form identities, and how we bond. No matter how hard we try, we can’t help being insignificant, biased creatures shaped by our past. Leaving space to accept that imperfection might be more important than sculpting ourselves to be better productive members of the system. Similarly, people need things to live for, to work towards, so cutting out the future seems even more impossible. Also, coming to terms with the past/future and saying the past/future doesn’t matter are very different things. Recognizing the regrets of your past while also embracing the possibilities of your future just sounds like healthy human stuff, and the solipsism of my self-made fatalistic behavioral therapy is probably best reserved for emergency scenarios.

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A World That Remembers

But it gets so much more complicated when you zoom out into larger conversations about the world. War, for example. The genocide going on in Gaza right now, the war in Ukraine, they can all be explained away by the past. The history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, from the Nakbah to the Six-Day War, the different interpretations people have of the Ukraine war (“It’s NATO’s fault,” etc.)—almost everybody I know who’s more ambivalent on these issues goes to the justification of history. It was leading up to this, they say. It was inevitable because (insert party of blame of your choice) did this and that. Not even going that far, there’s also the case of my home country. China is a country defined by itself. Its history, its trauma, and its ancient culture are all constantly reinforced in the public consciousness and in the global arena—see the entire reason why the CCP still claims Taiwan is a part of China.

In these cases, it feels like the attachment to the past is used as a form of control and complacency. China gets away with becoming a dominating authoritarian hegemony because it was attacked by several a hundred years ago; the Israel-Gaza and Ukraine situations stagnate because each side can argue for their own historical legitimacy. It’s tiring, seeing conversations that go around and around only to piss off everybody involved, but most of all - it’s frustratingly undeniable. The past, unless it’s all revealed to be an elaborate fake, is rigid and uncaring of the present. Can I really say the hundreds of thousands dead from the Rape of Nanjing, or an entire nation being forced to get hooked on imported opioids, is not a valid reason for the Chinese to desire a strong state? Can I really say that the suffering of the Palestinian people are all for naught? What about Jews that want to return to their holy land after enduring the Holocaust? Maybe, I doubt it but maybe, someone more educated can claim to a “true” interpretation of history and a logically sound solution to everything, but even then, the past that animates the opposing forces won’t stop to hear him out.

I see suffering right now in the world, and hear all of these justifications of why it happens, and I’m left paralyzed and defeated. It feels deeply wrong to think about the necessity of the past in these situations, or the value we people put on the past. “Action now!” is the reasonable and probably pragmatic response, but in the process we trample on so many people’s memories and pasts, the things that define them. It’s easy to say to throw that away - most of these “pasts” are mirages constructed by people in power to keep the people complacent, but they’re also culture, identity, community. And no one can live without them. So what do we do? Nothing? How could I just go back to only living in the present at this point?

Slavoj Žižek in his 2023 book Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future? , like a philosopher does, posits more questions than answers. He analyzes various dire questions of our time through mostly deconstructing them in a series of witty, but dense essays I have to be in a specific complainy mood to fully comprehend. But an idea did stick out to me, right in the beginning of the book: the difference between futur and avenir, two French words describing future with a subtle difference. Futur stands for the future as the continuation of the present: the full actualization of tendencies that are already in place. Avenir points towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present - to something that is to come (a venir), not just what will be. In order to reach that breaking point, we need to retroactively interpret the past (not “understand” its progression) in such a way that it opens up into a different future. And, I mean. Damn. He said it.

Maybe the only way out of this is to get out of what we previously thought as the past - rigid and unmoving. That mentality in itself feels like a constraint that opens a slippery slope of discrimination thinly veiled in historic realism (not based on any evidence, just from how many history buffs I know think it’s also very funny to joke about the n word). Breaking away from that interpretation into a conception of a malleable past may be the first step in a future with the possibility of emancipation, where the present isn’t the only thing we can focus on without losing our minds. Recognize the importance of your past, but don’t worship it, and you’ll be good.

Maybe this was all just some circular yapping. Maybe it’s all very obvious to you and I’m just talking to a group of mentally unstable neurotics (me), I don’t know really. But I found this really funny.

ok bye