One morning recently I was sitting on the bus on a miserable overcast day and was deep in thought, as for some reason I often am on buses.
And that morning, not for the first time, I found myself wondering about the minds of bus drivers.
You see, the thing about bus drivers is that I just don’t relate to them at all. I can’t empathise with the inclination to drive a bus full of strangers on a circular traffic-loaded route around the county all day, five days a week, for not that much money.
My philosophy to live a happy fulfilling life is to move on to better and better things. The pleasure and the fulfilment is in the moving, the reaching of the better place, and then the pleasure of moving on again to an even better place. Driving around in circles every day for a fixed salary does not fit that philosophy.
It’s mainly because of this that I expect driving a bus nine to five would pretty much kill me. Becoming a bus driver, given the way I currently think, would be emotional and intellectual suicide.
So, I couldn’t help feeling that bus drivers (the ones that aren’t dead inside, at least) are on to something that I’m not. It’s all very well to have an empowering philosophy towards life and to strive to live life to that philosophy, but a part of being a really developed human being should include being able to do things such as a drive a bus for a living without feeling utterly wretched.
Bus driving is a job that has no meaning to me and that wouldn’t stimulate me. Frighteningly, this is true of pretty much any job.
I spent substantially less money than my peers at university for the first year mainly so I wouldn’t have to get a job this summer – my experiences of entry-level work have been soul killing. But does it have to be this way?
The hundreds of crappy jobs that exist aren’t going to change, but can I? Can I change so that typical God awful work doesn’t make me miserable? If I can change, it’s worth doing so – because I can’t guarantee I can avoid such work for ever. And besides, I want to live without that dread of rubbish work.
Present-term and long-term thinkers
We all think in the present-term and the long-term. We’re all capable of totally appreciating the taste of a slice of blackberry pie as we chew on it, without thought for anything else, and then, once swallowed, contemplate whether we should buy an apple pie instead next Monday.
However, I think it’s very rare for a person to ever balance present-term and long-term thinking perfectly. I also think it might be impossible, short of a severe mental handicap, to think purely in the present-term or long-term.
Thus I believe virtually all of us tend to favor one over the other, usually without realising we’re doing so. This can affect our day-to-day well-being and the likelihood of us striving to reach our better places.
The comfort and the sorrow of siding with the present-term
The cleaners, clerks, cashiers, dustmen, deliverymen, door-to-door salesmen, telemarketers, milkmen, cab drivers and, yes, bus drivers of the world who don’t hate their jobs are enjoying the comfort of present-term thinking. To some extent I envy these blue collar workers because they have a greater capacity to get through tedious work because they live more in the moment.
However, it is because they live more in the moment (and don’t think much in the long-term) that they are unable to find the motivation to take on the major tasks and projects. They don’t grasp the end result well enough.
This is the comfort and sorrow of the present-term thinker. They live moment for moment, which is a comfortable way to live but one that is likely to be doomed to mediocrity or worse: therein lies the sorrow.
If you’re a present-term thinker every now and again you may dream of a life of riches and personal freedom in which you really make a difference but, somewhat dismally, you resign yourself to the idea that you’ll never accomplish so much and you go back to concentrating on what is happening right now.
There are plenty of quotes from the successful along the lines of ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’ and this is very likely to be the fate of present-term thinkers. Success tends not to be accidental.
The gain and the suffering of siding with the long-term
The lawyers, doctors, managers, computer programmers, accountants, translators and bureaucrats who don’t hate their jobs are enjoying the gain of long-term thinking. These white-collar workers have a greater capacity to reach their goals and dreams because they live for the future. That’s why so many of them have degrees – it’s an example of how they’re prepared to commit to even more exams and coursework beyond high school because they believe it will pay off later.
People who heavily side with the long-term have the capacity to take on the major tasks and projects because they can see the end result, but they don’t have the capacity to get through the major projects because they don’t live in the present. They see years of hard work to complete, not the current few seconds of work that is all that really exists.
Paid by the hour jobs can be hell for hardcore long-term thinkers. They can’t get over the aimlessness of them or the inefficiency of them to get money. Because they live in their visions of the pay-off that comes later, employment tends not to cut it for them because promotions are too few and far between and they tend to have the foresight to recognise that no career has a pay-off worth 20 years of nine-to-five frustration.
So, the unpleasant poetry of it all is…
A present-term thinker who wants to become a millionaire has the ability to grind out the hours of work to achieve the dream, but doesn’t have the motivation or the foresight to start.
A long-term thinker who wants to become a millionaire has the motivation and the foresight to do so, but doesn’t have the capacity to grind out the hours of work to get there.
Hollywood misled me
How many movies have you watched which are about a blue collar worker (a butcher, an assembly line worker, a carpenter – that sort of thing) who yearns to become a stockbroker, an actor, a ballet dancer, a poet, a business owner, an athlete – that sort of thing?
There are lots of them. Rocky and The Pursuit of Happyness are two of the most famous examples. The reason there are so many is because this is the American Dream embodied.
What these inspiring feel-good movies depict are people shifting from present-term thinking to long-term thinking.
But because the writers don’t think of their stories in these terms the transition is never spelled out. The heroes just get this burst of motivation, inspiration or threat and off they go – jumping from getting by moment to moment to thinking in the long-term without dropping a beat. Well, I’m not sure motivation tends to work that way – because it doesn’t tend to last.
There has to be another way, a more authentic way, of making the transition. Maybe one that doesn’t fit into two hours minus the ending credits.
The first ideal
The first ideal is to use both terms of thinking effectively. This solution isn’t just to find a balance or a compromise – but to use them only in certain ways so that they complement each other and enrich your life.
This is why the first ideal is this: your vision must be long-term but your everyday awareness must be present-term.
When you’re planning think in the long-term. Sometimes opportunities will come along and you’ll have to briefly jump into long-term thinking to take advantage of them. Other than when you’re planning or when you’ve been confronted with opportunities though, you should think in the present-term.
If your plans are good enough, from your daily timetables to your monthly targets, then you should be able to comfortably spend over 98% of your time thinking and living in the present.
This is how to get the best of both worlds: the comfort of present-term thinking with the gain of long-term thinking, while avoiding the sorrow and suffering.
The second ideal
Thinking back to the paragraphs on the comfort and sorrow of present-term thinkers, you may have disagreed with me. You may have argued that some present-term thinkers aren’t so tragic – that some of them don’t have such lofty dreams at all and that they’re really happy in their present-term thinking.
Such people do exist, and this is the basis for ideal number two. Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, is about just that from what I understand – present-term thinking without the sorrow. A Buddhist belief is that constant (or near constant, I’m not sure) present-term thinking is a means through which to be happy.
Therefore the second ideal I propose is to abandon (or near enough abandon) long-term thinking – especially the ‘living in the future’ aspect to it – and become disciplined enough to enjoy every moment for what it is.
How do you achieve either of those ideals?
The only means I’ve heard of is through meditation – Buddhist meditation specifically. I’ve done a bit of reading about it but have yet to give it a proper try. Thus, on Tuesday evening (26/05/08) I’m going to a Buddhist meditation class.
As you may have guessed from this post, I’m a long-term thinker and in the past (and still every now and again to this day) I can succumb to the suffering of living in the future to the detriment of my experience of the present.
I’m looking forward to seeing if, with enough practice, I can achieve one of the ideals above through daily meditation. Expect to read about my efforts here on the blog, should any of them be worth sharing.
The questions I want to leave you with are: which sort of thinker are you? Do you tend to live in the present, or in the past and/or future? And how does your tendency affect your well-being and your odds of reaching your better place?
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