Looking Ahead
Walking past a university, I see the students, and perhaps some high school students who hope to enter the university next year. There are smiles on their faces, along with a sense of hope and excitement about what lies ahead.
I remember being around their age. I don’t remember exactly how I felt back then, but I am sure there was hope and excitement, too. There was a sense of looking forward to what was yet to come, to a future that had not yet unfolded.
Now, I am older. Statistically speaking, they have more years ahead of them than I do, although age alone can never tell us how much time any of us has left.
I can still have hopes and feel excitement. That part of me has not necessarily disappeared. But my mind is now filled with other things: bills, work, children, and the countless responsibilities of everyday life. These things are important, of course, but they can also occupy so much of my attention that I sometimes forget what it feels like simply to be alive, to feel excited about the possibilities that life still holds.
And perhaps this is not just about me.
On a much larger scale, all of us will eventually leave this world. Each of us is here for a while, experiencing life from the inside, through our own consciousness. We know that we exist now. We can look around and see the world, recognize the people in it, and feel that we are part of something.
Of course, we have scientific explanations for many things about our existence. We know a great deal about how the universe developed, how life evolved, and how our brains work.
There are also ideas that challenge our understanding of reality itself. Perhaps the universe is a simulation. Perhaps what we experience as reality is not quite what we think it is. Perhaps our perception of the world is only a representation constructed by our brains, rather than a direct experience of things as they exist independently of us.
Some of these ideas are scientific hypotheses, others are philosophical possibilities, and not all have the same evidence behind them.
I sometimes wonder whether we could ever know for certain that we have understood reality as it really is.
For all we know, someone might eventually discover that the universe runs on software. I would be curious to know who wrote it, and whether they ever expected us to figure it out.
Jokes aside, there is still much we do not understand about consciousness itself: how subjective experience arises, and why it feels like something to experience the world from the inside.
We can study the brain and observe what happens when it thinks, remembers, or perceives. But fully explaining why these processes are accompanied by subjective experience remains an open problem.
Perhaps one day we will understand much more than we do today. Perhaps some of our questions will turn out to be based on assumptions we have yet to recognize.
But for now, there is one thing we cannot easily dismiss from our own experience.
We are here, experiencing something.
And yet, beyond this present moment, so much remains unknown. We don’t really know where we came from in the grandest sense, and we don’t know what, if anything, awaits us after we leave.
For now, though, we are here.
We are conscious of our existence. We can look at the world and wonder about it. We can feel hope, excitement, fear, and uncertainty. We can become so caught up in the demands of daily life that we forget how remarkable it is simply to experience any of this.
Perhaps growing older is not only about getting closer to the end of our lives. Perhaps it is also about learning not to become so consumed by the business of living that we forget to actually live.
What We Want to Take Back
Sometimes, when we see young people, like the students I saw today, or when we look at children, we find ourselves wishing we could go back to that age.
But what exactly is it that we want to return to?
Perhaps we don’t really want to become our younger selves again. Instead, we want to return to that time while keeping everything we have learned since then: our experiences, our knowledge, our memories, and even the lessons we learned from our mistakes.
If we could do that, we would have more years ahead of us, but we would not have to begin again with the same limited understanding of the world. We could carry everything we know today into that younger life and use it to face whatever lies ahead.
In a sense, we want to keep what we have gained while reclaiming the time we have lost.
There is something almost unreasonable about this wish, when you think about it. We want the time we spent making mistakes, learning lessons, and becoming who we are today, but we also want to go back to a point before we made those mistakes.
We want to keep the results without having to repeat the process.
And perhaps that is precisely the appeal. We know things now that we didn’t know then. We have experienced things we could not have imagined at that age. If we could bring all of that into a younger life, perhaps we could make better choices, avoid some regrets, and experience more of what the world has to offer.
But even then, we would still be facing a future we could not fully predict.
Perhaps We Just Want More Time
There may be another reason we wish we could return to our younger years, one that is less comfortable to acknowledge.
Maybe, beneath our nostalgia for youth and our longing for more opportunities, there is also a fear of death.
We know that our lives will eventually end, but we do not know what lies beyond that ending, or whether there is anything beyond it at all.
Perhaps the wish to return to a younger age is, at least in part, a wish to postpone that uncertainty. If we could have more time, we would not have to face the end just yet.
Of course, we cannot know whether this is what lies behind every wish to be young again. Sometimes we simply miss the freedom, the possibilities, or the way the world once seemed so full of things waiting to be discovered.
But perhaps these desires are not entirely separate.
We want more time to experience life, more time to discover what we have not yet discovered, and more time to understand what we cannot yet understand.
And perhaps, in the end, we want more time simply because we are here now, conscious of our existence, and not quite ready to let go of it.
Would More Time Ever Be Enough?
Suppose we could return to our younger selves with all the knowledge and experience we have today.
Would we finally feel ready to face the future?
I suspect not.
We might make better decisions. We might avoid some of the mistakes we regret today. We might discover new opportunities and experience things we would otherwise have missed.
But we would also encounter new problems, new uncertainties, and new things we wanted to accomplish.
Perhaps we would reach an age at which we once thought we would be satisfied, only to discover that we wanted another chance again.
If we had more time, we might want even more time. If we understood more, we might discover even more things we wanted to understand. The more we experienced, the more we might realize that there was still so much we had never experienced.
There would always be another possibility, another question, another place to see, or another experience we had not yet had.
And even if we could somehow remove all the uncertainty from our lives, I wonder whether we would truly be satisfied. Would knowing exactly what lay ahead make us feel ready for the end, or would we simply find another reason to keep going?
Perhaps the problem is not that we have too little time or too little knowledge. Perhaps it is that we are human beings who can imagine possibilities beyond what we currently have.
We can always imagine a little more.
And as long as we can imagine more, perhaps what we have will never feel quite enough.
The Life We Sometimes Forget to Live
There is an irony in all of this.
We wish we had more time, yet we spend so much of the time we already have thinking about other things.
Bills need to be paid. Work needs to be done. Children need our attention. There are responsibilities to fulfill, problems to solve, and countless ordinary things that demand our attention.
None of these things is necessarily wrong. They are part of living, and many of them matter deeply to us.
But somewhere among all these responsibilities, we can forget that we are not simply preparing to live. We are already living.
We may look at young people and wish we could return to their age, forgetting that they, too, have worries and uncertainties of their own. We may look back at our past and imagine all the things we could have done differently, forgetting that the person we were then did not know what we know now.
And we may look toward the future, hoping for more time to do the things we have not yet done, without noticing how much of the present we spend waiting for that future to arrive.
Perhaps there is no simple solution to this. Knowing that life is finite does not automatically make us appreciate every moment. Knowing that we are fortunate to be here does not prevent us from becoming tired, distracted, worried, or bored.
We cannot spend every moment contemplating existence. We still have to go to work, pay our bills, raise our children, and do the ordinary things that keep life moving.
Perhaps the point is not to escape those responsibilities, but to remember that they are happening within a life we are already experiencing.
The students I saw today may be looking forward to the years ahead. I once looked forward to my own future, too. And now, with more experience behind me and an unknown amount of time ahead, I still have things I want to do and things I want to understand.
Maybe I always will.
Perhaps growing older is not only about getting closer to the end of our lives. Perhaps it is also about realizing how easily we can become so consumed by the business of living that we forget to actually live.
And perhaps that is why, when we see young people and wish we could return to their age, what we really want is not simply to be young again.
We want another chance at the life we have already begun.
More time, perhaps.
Perhaps we are never quite ready to leave.