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Clichés are clichés for a reason.

Yes, we have past, present, and future. But you can't change past: it's gone so in the end it's not much to live for. You can't live for future either: you can just project now into something you think would be a good future. Thus, even planning for future happens now. It is now when anything happens and where any choices are made. Past and future are important and useful, but they only exist as concepts in your mind. You can't live future or past and while trying to do so can be soothing it will never get you anywhere.

In my humble opinion, it is foolish to underestimate the special position of now.

I can't deny the sound logic of your first statement. (see: tautology) Reasons include anecdotes, cuteness of the sentiment, and others. If you want to defend it, do. Don't strawman my arguments, though.

You live all of the future and the past. They all happen. You're mostly arguing semantics about the future, and you're ignoring the past almost entirely. My reasons for their importance stand, unaddressed.

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

-Mahatma Gandhi

When I look at people who seem to have lived long, vibrant lives, people such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Georgia O'Keeffe, I see people who acted as if they expected to live forever.

What stands out as a key difference between the happy and the unhappy is the belief that good, interesting, exiting things are ahead. Hell, more than half the fun of a vacation is the expectation of the fun you're going to have. (See also: certain beliefs in an afterlife.)

It pains me, as I get older, to see some of my friends and family shift from being upbeat and energetic, folks who made plans for the future, to dour and nostalgic, as if everything good that might ever happen to them has already passed.

Fuck that. Never stop.

Thanks. Living only for today is living For a fraction of your life.

This is what I've seen, too. Today's great, but tomorrow always can be better. I live every day, and I want to live for the rest of them.

"If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss."

Living for the now doesn't mean being a dopamine junkie.

I went to college knowing that it was basically useless for what I wanted to do with my life. I went because it was time - all the adults around me said that I'd be missing out on an awesome experience if I didn't, and while I was a little skeptical, I figured I'd give it a try. That, and the economy was about to enter the shitter (it was 2001), and the company I was working at was about to lay off 40% of its workforce.

I majored in physics because I liked the feeling of sitting out on my roof with sunshine on my face (yeah, New England, it didn't last very long), textbook in my lap, working on really hard math problems. As it turned out, I didn't like it enough to stick with it. I then majored in computer science because I had found out that I liked it enough to spend my weekends working on compilers and my late nights reading up on programming language design. At the time I did those, I was a physics major, and they were completely irrelevant to anything that might possibly advance my degree or career. But they were fun.

I read The Intelligent Investor because I'd just started working at a financial software startup, had an hour long commute, and figured it might be more fun to figure out what I'd just gotten myself into rather than stare at the silent faces on the train. As it turned out, after reading The Intelligent Investor I didn't much like what I'd gotten myself into at all, which is why I'm not in finance now.

In one of Paul Graham's essays, he says that you can tell an adult from a child because an adult will tend to "lean into" challenges, accepting them as part of who they are instead of shrinking back from them. There's nothing that prevents you from building the habit of leaning into challenges into your daily identity. It doesn't particularly matter what those challenges are, it matters that you attack them. If you build this habit, you'll usually do fairly well even if you don't make a master plan for your life. Heck, you'll probably do better than people who do create a master plan, because life has a way of biting you in the ass and tearing your plans to shreds.

This appears to be the essay you're talking about: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"

> Living for the now doesn't mean being a dopamine junkie.

Since dopamine is for desire, you probably meant opioid, which is for pleasure.

I think one of the key words here that the OP didn't use was "for." I.e. he never said "I live for the present."

Rather, I think the word he was going for (correct me if I'm wrong) was "in." I.e. "Live in the present moment." Don't live in the past, don't live in the future, etc...

And that to truly live in the present moment, you have to take the wisdom of the past, and consider the weight your actions will hold in the future, but ultimately all you have is now. So I don't think what you said goes against what the OP said, it just highlights a different aspect. The past was lived, the future will be lived, but your decisions will be most important when they happen. You're not living if you're stuck in the past or displacing the present for some hazy future (a young investment banker working 100 hours a week for...).

Also, there are "present" qualities in all the examples you gave. Assistive brain/spine implants improves the present moment living conditions of other humans. We can use programming and the skills we have to build tools that help people better live their lives.

Also, things like love and other people are strongest in the present moment. Ultimately we likely invest and we study because so that we can make ourselves happy or search outside of ourselves, but a lot of times it's a lot closer (both physically and temporally) than we might think.