The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
- Albert Einstein
Time is a reality. Time passes. Seasons change. Trees lose their leaves in autumn before re-growing new ones in spring. Time passes and there is not much we can do about it. Except decide how we conceptualise it. The idea we have of time is a constructed one. Humans decided at some point that 1 hour would be 60 minutes, 1 minute 60 seconds, and agreed on how long a second was (thus defining the length of millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond, so on so forth). One day, humanity decided to agree on the length of the hour, day, month, and year. They standardised the concept of time.
One thing even humans could not define with surgical precision is the concept of “present”. There is no doubt regarding the fact that we all have a past, and we will have a future. Measuring the length of our past is fairly easy: it is all the time past from our birth until the present moment. The length of our future cannot be pre-determined however; we can make estimations based on general cases, based on people sharing similar characteristics with us (age, gender, lifestyle, known genetic predispositions…), but we cannot say precisely how long our future will be. Another thing we seem to struggle with is deciding when the present stops to become the future, or when does the future becomes the present moment.
How long is “now”? A common conception of the “now”, also known as the “subjective present”, was 3 seconds. This definition of the “now” was quite popular: it is an easy concept, we can measure it, we understand it, it is clear. The present is a shifting 3-second window, always moving forward. Turns out simple concepts are not always accurate. In 2017, a review conducted at Cardiff University showed that the present moment, the “now”, is a fluctuating concept. It is a flexible period of time during which the brain collects information through different channels (vision, ears, nose…) and puts them together to create an overall representation of our surrounding. This representation, this picture of the moment, has no fixed time limit but can easily last for longer than 3 seconds.
Fair enough, but quite abstract still. How long is “now”?
A bi-national research team has recently addressed this intriguing question: it depends. There. Nice and simple. They could not find one unique timeframe all their participants agreed to be “the present”. The perception of the duration of the present varies between individual, impacting present choices and future lives. It only took them 6 different studies and over 6,000 participants to come up with this finding. Just over 700 participants contributed to defined how long they felt the present to last, resulting in about 50% saying the present would end within the next hour (varying from right now to within the next second, minute or hour) and 15% using some future event as marking the end of the present (usually, their own death was the event marking the difference between present and future – a bit egocentric if you ask me). The research team also found that those conceptualisation of the duration of the present time was consistent over time. People will always perceive the present to be define in a same way throughout their lives. There are stable individual differences in when people feel the future starts.
So, we all perceive the present/future limit in our own ways, usually with a bit of a grey area between the two not present anymore but not quite future yet. Why is that? No idea. The research might have conducted an incredibly thorough analysis of when people perceived the future would start but they could not include in-depth analyses of cultural, religious, personality-based reasons for it. What they did find is that external factor could influence our perceptions and future decisions. When the future was prompted to be coming soon, using statements like “the present is short and the future starts sooner”, participants tended to make more far-sighted, long-term, future-oriented choices, including enrolling for bootcamps giving tips to save money for the future or choosing gift card to be used in the future rather than for immediate purchases.
The present moment has a different length for everyone of us. It can even have different duration within a day. It can be defined as a succession of actions that can be linked together into one temporal unity. The end of one temporal unity marks the end of one “now” and the beginning of the next one. While I wrote this post, I had different “now”: first I read about the subject I wanted to write about; then I got up and got a cup of tea; I sat back and started writing. Three present moments led to the creation of this post, couple of hours after I first opened my laptop. All of those present moments had a different duration, but all were “now” while I was in them.
The present is informed by our past: thanks to our memory, we have the possibility to reflect on past experiences to learn from them and avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again. The future might not be yet, but what we do in the now has an impact on our future. Future-oriented decisions will shape the time that has yet to be. What will be depends on what is. Live in the moment, but think about the future.
It is time to leave the “now” and move to the future, whatever I make it to be.
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