The Future Perfect Ideal
13 05 2008I’ve been developing a thought process recently that has led me to accomplish daunting tasks with ease and to eschew the worry associated with pending crises of variable alarm. Those with a propensity for idle worry will find themselves in despair over looming, unwanted events, whereas I can simply pass these events off as complete before they have been born. To attack such a paradox, I examine the event from the future: by X time, it will have been done. While I may not have started a term paper due a week later, I can avoid stress (which of course releases cortisone into the brain, inhibiting intelligent thought) by treating the paper as complete, by picturing myself one week later with several neat pages stapled together. I call such perspective the Future Perfect Ideal, which derives its name from the grammatical aspect of the thought process it defines.
In the name of fair judgment, I looked at my philosophy from the standpoint of the opposition. Time is an invented concept, and therefore there is no time but the present. ‘Past’ and ‘Future’ do not and cannot exist, as they are merely concepts laid out on a time line invented by humans, who chose arbitrarily to make it linear. (After all, who says time is not a cycle? Hundreds of cultures treat it that way, and some even have a mobile week focusing on ‘today.’) Because the future does not exist, ulterior events cannot logically be ‘complete.’ The only certainty about the future is that it can’t be predicted: so there is no way to know whether my term paper will actually be finished in the next seven days.
A fair argument. But assuming that I am still alive in seven days, and that I am duly compelled to complete college assignments on or before their deadlines, it is virtually certain that I will have completed my paper next week. The Future Perfect Ideal is by nature a conditional argument. But, ceteris parabus, it makes for sound logic.
What makes the Future Perfect Ideal adoptable is the notion that worry accomplishes nothing, and therefore it is useless to lament something that has yet to be undertaken. More preferable are the early congratulations borne by its acceptance. A recent example of the success of my philosophy was its application to three actual term papers assigned and due at generally the same times. Rather than fret over my personal, upcoming apocalypse, I simply told myself that at a certain point in time — namely, the end of the semester — I will have had three excellent term papers iced with shiny staples. Such was the case: while I worked methodically and kept the present in my peripheral vision, I focused on the future, on the date of completion for each paper. Two papers received A’s and one an A+.
I taught myself long ago not to worry — though we’re all human, and can’t help but indulge once in a while — but the addition of the Future Perfect Ideal to my mental repertoire of weapons against deadlines has proven to be a great asset.
Hey, great to see back. I thought you had given up!
Hey, doc. I don’t give up on things. I was just completely bogged down with reading and writing papers this semester, but I’m off for the summer now and I’m only working part-time so I can relax a bit. It’s nice.
Kevin, congratulations on the papers.
Writing experience really helps, doesn’t it? I went back to college in the late 1960s after working a couple of years in the newspaper business, including a wire service where we wrote for hourly deadlines. After that, writing papers for college seemed like a walk in the park.
As for worrying, my mother, rest her soul, used to say it was like paying advance interest on a loan you may never need to borrow.
Oh, and here’s another one to add to your grammatical syllabus, just after future perfect ideal: It’s called the future imperative, an expression I learned as a draftee in the Army. As when your sergeant looks at you with an ominous face and says, “You will report to K.P.” No choice about the future in this imperative.
Wow… the combination of working for a wire service and being in the Army must have drilled you with a nice amount of discipline. I’m sure it made writing your book a whole lot easier, didn’t it?
When I first began designing for a living, I never gave clients a time when I would finish what they asked for. I might have taken 2 weeks on my first few jobs. There was that apprehension over deadlines and I skewed it by not offering any. After years of work, I found it easy to give a deadline, in spite of the fact that, at the time, I had no idea what I was going to come up with. What started off at 2 weeks turned into 15 minutes. In the end, I realized that by not putting much effort into the thought and by not allowing myself to be put under undue stress and pressure, ideas would just come when I least expected them. I think it’s a cause/effect sort of thing. I became so comfortable that my work usually turned out better than what I expected to begin with. It was just routine.
Time wasn’t the factor. Confidence was. I knew I could do it, and I did for 30 years. Of course, that’s the past now. To me, future is one step beyond now. One understands that the odds are great that we will be here one second from now, and that is future thinking. What else would drive us to create? To make career moves? To plan for retirement?
According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as we approach the speed of light, the perceived universal speed limit, time slows down. We will never be able to achieve the speed of light or we would become invisible. Think about it. People see each other because of light reflection. That’s why we can’t see at night. Even night vision is based on a spectrum of light. If you held a mirror in front of your face traveling at the speed of light, the light reflecting off the mirror would have to be traveling faster than the speed of light in order to catch up to the mirror. Not possible. Consequently, you would not be able to see your own reflection. Time is altered. This partially explains why you could leave earth, cavort around the universe for a couple of years, and return a hundred years later. Your time is constant, but time on earth is not the same. You, my friend, have changed time and traveled into the future, relative to home. All your friends and relatives are long dead.
Wow, what a comment!
I used to wait to get in the zone before I started writing. But I learned the hard way that the only way to become a good writer is to write a lot, all the time, and even if you sit at the computer and stare at a blank screen for an hour, somewhere in the back of your brain ideas are flowing. I learned that you have to write sometimes when you least feel like writing — when it feels like work — because once you start, you get into the flow, and the words come gushing out. I learned that writing every day makes it a natural activity that becomes easier, and better, each time.
About the speed of light: I’ve thought about what you explained many times, and I still have a problem with the whole thing. The argument is logical. But — excuse my wording here for an outer space matter — if you take the whole thing from a down-to-earth perspective, and just take a mental glance at it, it seems quite impossible to age any faster than your friends. Even if you do travel the speed of light, my best instincts tell me that time remains constant. After all, we do measure light with time — light years. While I’m standing here on Earth, countless events are taking place in the cosmos, even if they’re just light traveling from a star or a few particles floating around. But a second is still a second and a minute is still a minute. You couldn’t see your reflection with a mirror before you, that’s reasonable. But despite the rest of the logic, I can’t subscribe to the alteration of time. It’s fun to think about, though. And to think about the social and moral consequences (if your body could withstand such a high velocity.)