Between Productivity and Meaning: A Reflection on the Difficulty of Inhabiting the Present

By Leandro Castelluccio

Rediscovering the Present: One of the Keys to the Foundations of Well-Being

There is a silent trajectory in contemporary experience: the more refined the devices that once promised to liberate us—technological, economic, sanitary—the more densely the impossibility of rest takes hold. Rest, far from appearing as a conquered dimension, becomes a suspicious territory, almost culpable. The subject, even in the formal suspension of his obligations, does not cease to feel addressed by a diffuse demand: to produce, to advance, not to interrupt the ascending line of his own performance, or even of his most intimate dimension—his life projects. It is not simply that we do not know how to rest, but that, in part, we have unlearned what it would mean to do so without having to justify it.

This is not a naïve condemnation of work, achievement, or the future. These dimensions, in themselves, contain no pathology, although I would nuance this by noting that it depends on what we understand by “work.” Lately, I am not among those who believe that work, in itself, dignifies or confers a sense of vital merit. A diffuse criterion of what counts as work tends to level all forms of human activity, yet not all activity elevates us vitally, nor must work, as such, be connected to the idea of dignity. We ought to think of work as time devoted to ourselves through certain activities that enable us to elevate ourselves and to actualize a creative, vital, aesthetic, innovative potential—a development of qualities that are conducive to life.

The point is that the deviation occurs at another, deeper level, where a tacit equivalence is established between value and projection, between meaning and deferral. Life thus becomes subordinated to a structure of postponement: what matters is always ahead, never here. In this continuous displacement, the present loses its thickness; it becomes instrumental, a mere phase of transit. Yet, as I suggest in Propositions, what underlies this is not simply a poor distribution of time, but an impoverished understanding of self-esteem: it is sought in its external manifestations—achievement, recognition, accumulation—without noticing that these are nothing more than secondary effects of a more radical evolution, that of the self in its capacity for intelligence, consciousness, and virtue.

The problem then assumes a more precise form: we have located the center of gravity of existence in a time that, philosophically speaking, does not exist. The future—that imaginary archive of fulfilled goals, consolidated identities—becomes the affective operator that organizes our decisions. Yet the future, as such, lacks substance for us; it is a symbolic construction that derives its force from a promise that can never be verified in the present. This temporal inversion produces a paradox: the more we orient life toward its future realization, the more we empty the only dimension in which that realization could take place. The present, reduced to a launching platform, becomes uninhabitable.

Hence the discomfort with leisure. Not because leisure lacks value, but because it cannot be easily translated into the grammar of utility. Not resting, then, is not an imposition: it is a form of fidelity to an identity constructed as a project toward the future.

It is no coincidence that this configuration has a genealogy. Since the Industrial Revolution, work ceased to be one activity among others and became the structuring axis of identity. Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that industriousness was elevated to a sign of salvation, a moral index of worth. Leisure time, by contrast, came to be marked by a persistent suspicion. What is interesting is that, even as material conditions have changed, this moral coding of time persists as an invisible sediment. We do not work merely in order to live; we live under the premise that to work—or, more broadly, to perform—is what legitimizes our existence.

Social media intensifies this logic to an almost caricatural degree, though none the less effectively for that. Within it, life is exhibited as a sequence of optimized moments: each experience must not only be lived, but validated. Even rest becomes a performance. It is not enough to rest; one must do so in a way that can be recognized as valuable. Thus, leisure is reinscribed within the economy of performance: it becomes productive insofar as it is image. And in that shift, its most elementary dimension is lost—the one that requires neither display nor justification.

Yet the most persistent pressure does not come from without, but from an almost imperceptible internalization: the imperative to make use of time. This imperative does not operate as an explicit norm, but as a constant affective tonality, a slight discomfort that arises whenever activity ceases. Inaction is then experienced as a form of loss—not of time in a quantitative sense, but of possibility. Especially in subjects oriented toward ambitious goals, rest appears as a betrayal of the self. But here a fissure becomes visible: what kind of project demands the systematic negation of the conditions that make it possible? A project that cannot tolerate rest is, ultimately, a project that erodes its own foundation.

The consequences of this configuration are not merely psychological, though they manifest there with clarity: exhaustion, anxiety, an incapacity for enjoyment. Something more radical is at stake. In losing the capacity to inhabit the present, one also loses the possibility of experience in the strong sense. Life becomes a succession of anticipations—as if it could only be lived in deferred form.

And yet, a minimal shift suffices for the entire conceptual edifice to begin to waver. Let us consider a flower as a phenomenon. Its existence is not justified by its duration nor by its utility. It does not persist, accumulate, or project. It simply occurs. In that contingency—in that absence of any need to prolong itself—something is disclosed that our logic of performance fails to grasp: that value does not depend on extension, nor on finality, nor on any grand goal or fulfilled project as we tend to imagine it in the future.

The flower is not an argument against meaning; it is a silent reformulation of what we understand by it. Its beauty does not reside in a secured future, but in the intensity of its presence. And perhaps here a more demanding hypothesis begins to emerge: that meaning is not found at the end of a process, as a deferred reward, but is at stake in the way something—a life, a moment—manages to unfold in its own immediacy.

This does not imply abandoning the future, nor renouncing action or projects. It implies, rather, a reordering of hierarchy: that the future ceases to be the tribunal that judges the value of the present, and that the present recovers its density as the site where value can effectively occur. In this gesture—neither spectacular nor definitive—that unease which prevents us from resting might begin, at least partially, to be deactivated. For perhaps resting is not a matter of stopping, but, more precisely, of ceasing to postpone life or to make its value depend on a dimension that, from a vital standpoint, does not exist, and which we nonetheless conceive in some way as a contingent framework. The future is what is to come, but it is variable: it may contain the successes of our projects, or their failures, and, in the very long run, quite possibly their oblivion by the rest of sentient beings.

Scarcity as a Measure of Value

There is, within the affective economy of the human being, an almost axiomatic inclination: what is valuable adheres to what is scarce. This is not merely a cultural convention, but a mode of structuring attention. Georg Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money, formulates this with precision: value is not an inherent property of things, but the distance we establish from them. That which withdraws, which does not offer itself without resistance, acquires salience; that which is given without limit, by contrast, dissolves into the background of the undifferentiated. In economics, this logic is codified as price; in life, it ought to be expressed as significance and value.

Yet this law, so evident in the order of objects, operates with an almost cruel irony when transposed to lived time. For what is most radically scarce—what, once lost, admits of no restitution—is nothing other than the instant. There is no reserve, no accumulation, no return. And yet it is precisely here that our sensibility seems to fail: we treat the present as though it were abundant, as though it could be deferred without cost, as though its disappearance were not definitive. But each instant, each second we live, is unrepeatable. Its singular character renders it infinitely valuable, for its scarcity, from the human standpoint, invests it with significance and worth.

Each second occurs only once. This assertion, which might appear trivial, contains a radicality that is rarely pursued to its ultimate consequences. It is not merely that time passes, but that each configuration of the world—each intertwining of bodies, perceptions, affects—emerges and vanishes without the possibility of replication. Henri Bergson, in Matter and Memory, insisted that duration is not a succession of homogeneous instants, but a qualitative continuity irreducible to repetition. What occurs, occurs in a manner that cannot be cloned.

And yet we live as though what is to come possessed greater density than what is already occurring. Thus a disproportion is established: the imagined weighs more than the experienced. We seek that “something more”—achievement, goal, promise—as though it contained an intensification of life that the present cannot provide. But in this projection, what is lost is not only attention, but reality itself. For the only place where anything can be lived is here, in this immediacy that, paradoxically, we treat as though it were secondary.

One might object that the future is privileged because it is the space in which something as important as our projects unfolds. Yet this defense of the future as the sanctuary of our projects commits a fallacy of displacement: it confuses direction with substance. The project, however ambitious, remains an architecture of waiting, a way of colonizing the void with the language of intention. By granting greater density to the “to come” than to the “occurring,” we turn existence into a mere instrument, a toll to be paid in order to access a destination that, once reached, dissolves into a new present equally ignored. Life cannot be a perpetual rehearsal for a work that never quite premieres; a project possesses truth only insofar as it is lived as a vibration of the will in the now, not as a promise that drains the marrow of the real.

We forget that the project is an abstraction, a line drawn across the void, whereas the instant is the only material upon which that line can be sustained. If the future is the space of possibility, the present is the only space of actuality. To displace value toward the “after” is to strip being of its center of gravity, leaving it suspended in a melancholy of what is not yet, while what is slips through the fingers like fine sand. The importance of the project does not reside in its future fulfillment, but in the intensity with which it endows present action with meaning; outside that immediacy, the project is merely a specter that distracts us from the only reality available.

We might ask, then, whether we are capable of sustaining this second not as a step, but as a miniature eternity. As in the question once posed by Nietzsche: if every gesture, every pain, and every joy of this precise moment were destined to return again and again in an endless cycle, would we still treat them with the lightness of one who awaits something better? True greatness does not lie in the overcoming of the present in favor of a distant goal, but in the capacity to say “yes” to the present configuration of the world with such force that nothing would be wished otherwise. Only he who embraces becoming without the consolation of an external end—without the crutch of a subsequent “for the sake of”—manages to rescue time from its apparent insignificance, transforming the fleeting instant into the absolute and sacred center of his existence.

For the project, as we habitually conceive it, often operates as a sophisticated defense mechanism against the vertigo of the ephemeral. We prefer the security of an abstract plan—where time seems to lie under our control—to the fragility of a living event that slips through our hands. By investing the “tomorrow” with absolute sovereignty, we deprive the “today” of its ontological weight, transforming reality into a mere prologue, an uneasy antechamber. But life is not a text to be read solely for its denouement; it is a weave of textures that exist only in immediate contact. If we persist in this forward flight, we risk becoming collectors of empty promises, incapable of recognizing that fullness does not await us at the summit of a distant achievement, but resides in the irreducible density of what is taking place right before us—even in the most humble and seemingly banal fold of the everyday.

Let us consider—not as a decorative example, but as an exercise in perception—a minimal scene: a group of children playing basketball. Nothing in it appears to demand importance. It is, at first glance, interchangeable with thousands of similar scenes. Yet this supposed banality dissolves as soon as the scale of consideration is altered. Within a universe that, as far as we know, has not produced another scene like it—neither those bodily trajectories, nor those bursts of laughter, nor that unrepeatable configuration of relations—what occurs there acquires an extreme singularity. Not because it is extraordinary in a spectacular sense, but because it is absolutely unique.

Here the notion of scarcity reveals itself in its most demanding form: not as lack, but as irrepeatability. A moment is not scarce because it occurs infrequently, but because it cannot occur again in the same way. Even the most meticulous repetition—the same gestures, the same place, the same people—fails to reinstate the same experience. There is always a discrepancy, an irreducible difference: time has passed, we have changed, the world is no longer the same. Repetition is, strictly speaking, an operative fiction.

This understanding, if taken seriously, does not lead to a naïve celebration of “living in the present,” but to a more unsettling reconfiguration: it displaces the axis of existential investment. If the only thing that is absolutely irrecoverable is the lived instant, then negligence toward it is not a mere oversight, but a form of structural loss. And yet we continue to defer intensity toward a future that, when it arrives, will once again present itself in the form of a new present, equally unattended.

Perhaps the problem is not that we project too much, but that we project poorly: we imagine the future as the place where that which is already being given to us—unceasingly, though unnoticed—will finally occur. In this sense, the invitation is not to abandon projection, but to deactivate its hegemony: to recognize that what we seek—intensity, meaning, fullness—is not a property of certain privileged goals or achievements, but a quality that depends on the way something is lived, and on how we articulate self-esteem with what we do as something developed in the present (Propositions).

To invest in the present does not mean to renounce the future, but to remove it from its position as a sovereign instance. It means, rather, recognizing that each moment—precisely by virtue of its finitude, its impossibility of repetition—is not necessarily a means to something else, but the only place where something like “value” can effectively occur. And this realization, far from being reassuring, introduces a more radical demand: that of no longer living as though what is essential could wait.

The Trap of the Future

Søren Kierkegaard had already warned that existence can slip into a subtle form of estrangement when it settles into permanent anticipation. In The Sickness unto Death, despair is not merely an affective state, but a misrelation of the self to itself: to live suspended between the melancholy of what has been and the anxiety of what has not yet come into being is, strictly speaking, a flight from one’s own actuality. This is not a psychological error, but a failed existential structure. The individual, unable to coincide with himself in the instant, disperses into temporalities he cannot inhabit. In response, Kierkegaard does not propose a naïve celebration of the present, but something more demanding: an authentic relation to it, which entails accepting the uncertainty of the future without turning it into a pretext for deserting the now.

Yet the contemporary grammar of progress seems to operate in the opposite direction. We have learned to modulate happiness in conditional terms: I will be when I achieve, I will be worthy when I succeed, I will rest when I finish. This structure—apparently rational—harbors a fiction that is rarely made explicit: that the future possesses greater ontological consistency than the present. But the future, strictly speaking, does not exist. It is an operative construction, a device of orientation that organizes action, yet lacks any reality of its own. Edmund Husserl had already shown, in his analyses of internal time-consciousness, that the future is nothing but a protention—an expectation that is always given in the present of consciousness. There is no access to it outside this mediation.

Moreover, even if one were to grant—against all phenomenological evidence—a certain consistency to the future, nothing guarantees that that toward which existence projects itself will come to constitute a meaningful horizon. The future may fail to exist, not only in the Husserlian sense of its merely protentional character, but in a more radical register: it may simply not occur. The universe itself could cease, exhaust itself in a terminal heat death without remainder, or persist under conditions so extreme that any form of conscious experience becomes unviable. And even if reality were to continue, there is no necessity that it do so in terms that preserve human intelligibility: it could become an indifferent domain, devoid of any correlation with our categories of value and meaning.

Even without appealing to such extreme cosmological scenarios, however, the fragility of the future is already inscribed in the contingency of the living. The extinction of the species is not an extravagant hypothesis, but a structural possibility. And more unsettling still: its eventual evolutionary overcoming would not ensure any continuity at the level of meaning. That into which the human being might transform—if such a transformation were to occur—could be so alien to our modes of understanding that all present aspirations would, in that displacement, become radically unmoored. In that case, not only would we disappear, but the very framework within which our valuations acquire meaning would also dissolve.

Something that today is invested with an almost unquestionable value—such as the book in its materiality—could be entirely devoid of meaning within broader temporal horizons (consider, for instance, ten thousand years hence), having perhaps vanished long before, to the point of disappearing not only as an object but as a form of cultural mediation. With it would also fade the vast networks of value—histories, narratives, philosophy, science, poetry—that once found inscription there. Likewise, experiences that today are laden with significance—a winter afternoon beside a domestic wood fire, for example—could become wholly unintelligible within a thousand years to forms of life that no longer share our technical conditions or our structures of sensibility. The issue, then, is not merely the loss of certain contents, but the dissolution of the very frameworks that make their valuation possible.

Precisely for this reason, the value of such experiences cannot be derived from their eventual preservation or projection in time. The book and the scene by the fire do not derive their worth from a future that would legitimize them, but from the fact that they are sustained—entirely—within the present that makes them possible. They are not for the future, nor do they find in it their raison d’être: they belong to the actuality of the experience that receives them. In this sense, life itself cannot be oriented as though it were a means toward a future that would justify it, because that future—incapable of hosting what is valued today—does not constitute the site where meaning is realized, but rather a projection that, strictly speaking, can receive nothing.

Even under the most conservative assumption—the persistence of forms of life comparable to our own—nothing safeguards our works from the systematic erosion of time. History does not necessarily preserve, and even less so over extended temporal spans: it reconfigures, substitutes, forgets. Achievements that today stand as culminations tend, over generations, to be absorbed into new syntheses, displaced by subsequent innovations, or simply abandoned in increasingly opaque zones of cultural memory. The vast majority of human productions—including those that once seemed decisive—fade without leaving any effective trace. And at broader temporal scales, the probability of being remembered converges virtually to zero. Not because of any injustice, but because the very movement of becoming tends to neutralize individual permanence.

To this must be added a feature that is less abstract, yet no less decisive: the intrinsically tragic character of the unfolding of our goals and projects. That which today takes shape as a horizon of meaning—what directs effort, structures waiting, and justifies postponement—is always exposed to a drift beyond our control. Projects may fail, deviate, come to fruition in ways unrecognizable in relation to their initial intention, or become obsolete even before they are realized. They may be surpassed by others, absorbed into logics that reconfigure them, or simply lose their relevance in a world that no longer coincides with the conditions under which they were conceived. Even in those cases in which something is “achieved,” there is no guarantee that such achievement will retain the meaning that motivated its pursuit. The future one sought to institute may fail to come into existence as such, even when all efforts are precisely directed toward producing it.

Thus, the future not only lacks reality in the strict sense, but also any guarantee with respect to its relevance, its accessibility, and its capacity to receive what we project onto it. It ultimately reveals itself as a doubly unstable horizon: ontologically evanescent and existentially inappropriable.

And yet, we live as though this construct possessed sufficient authority to regulate our access to vital meaning. We defer experience in the name of a projected fullness, as though the time to come were the place in which what is lived will finally be legitimized. But this logic contains a paradox that is rarely acknowledged: when that future arrives—if it arrives—it does so in the form of a new present, equally exposed to instrumentalization. Thus, the promise is never fulfilled; it is merely displaced.

Life, meanwhile, does not wait. It does not accumulate, it cannot be stored, it cannot be transferred. It unfolds in an immediacy that admits of no substitution. To sacrifice the present in the name of a hypothetical future is not an investment, but a loss without possible compensation. Not because the future lacks importance, but because it cannot receive that which only the present can host: experience itself, meaning, and value.

This does not, of course, entail a renunciation of planning nor an irresponsible disregard for the future. Rather, it demands a more precise reconfiguration: to detach happiness from its structural dependence on what is not guaranteed. The much-invoked “balance” is not a static midpoint, but a sustained tension: to project without abdicating, to anticipate without deserting, to build without emptying. A tension that is not resolved, but inhabited.

It is no coincidence that multiple traditions have insisted—each in its own way—on this centrality of the present. Buddhism, in its analysis of impermanence, does not seek to console, but to deactivate the illusion of permanence that sustains a misguided form of attachment; Stoicism, from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius, proposes a discipline of attention oriented toward what depends on us in each moment. Yet today these traditions run the risk of being absorbed into the very logic they sought to challenge: transformed into techniques of subjective optimization, into instruments for performing better, resting better, living more efficiently.

Here, a decisive inflection emerges: in a culture marked by acceleration, constant exposure, and relentless comparison, the simple act of inhabiting the present acquires an almost subversive dimension. Not as a romantic gesture nor as a withdrawal, but as an interruption of a logic that always demands more, always later, always elsewhere. To enjoy the moment is neither a luxury nor a technique; it is, in a certain sense, a form of resistance.

A resistance without stridency, yet no less radical for that: the refusal to continue delegating meaning to a time that, when it finally presents itself, slips away once more in the form of what is still lacking.

Beauty as a Connector

When the hypothesis of an originary consciousness is introduced—even if only as a limiting experiment—not so much as an efficient cause but as a principle of intelligibility of the universe, the question shifts: it is no longer a matter of explaining the how, but of interrogating the for what that insinuates itself in the very form of what exists. If that hypothetical creative instance were not oriented by necessity or utility, but rather by a kind of impulse toward the manifestation of the beautiful, then the world would cease to appear as a mere aggregate of blind processes and would instead begin to suggest itself as an offered scene, a surface of appearance whose intelligibility is not exhausted by causality.

This is not a matter of reinstating a naïve teleology. Rather, it involves attending to a feature that traverses experience: the recurrence of forms that, without apparent necessity, elicit wonder. From large-scale configurations—the choreography of galaxies—to the infinitesimal—the almost imperceptible vibration of a leaf in the air—there emerges a consistency that is not reducible solely to its function. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, described this experience as a “purposiveness without purpose”: a fittingness of forms that appears oriented, yet resists capture by any determinate end. The beautiful, in this sense, does not serve; it occurs.

And yet, this occurrence is not neutral. In the experience of beauty there is a particular modulation of consciousness: something is suspended. The distance between the perceiver and the perceived is attenuated—not through a strong form of mystical fusion, but through a kind of momentary coincidence in which the self ceases to operate necessarily as the organizing center. Martin Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art, suggests that in the work—and we might extend this to certain natural phenomena—a world is opened, not as an object set before a subject, but as a field in which both are implicated. We do not simply contemplate something beautiful; we are, for an instant, reconfigured by it.

We tend to call this transcendence, although the term perhaps conceals more than it reveals. It does not necessarily involve exiting oneself toward a beyond, but rather experiencing an internal displacement: a momentary deactivation of the usual coordinates that organize experience—utility, calculation, projection. In that interval, what appears is not “something greater” in a quantitative sense, but something denser, more immediate, more real in a way that is difficult to articulate without diminishing it.

Now, even if one were to admit—at the limit—the hypothesis of an originary consciousness or some kind of ordering principle, this would not imply the existence of an ultimate meaning or a final end in any strong sense. There would be no definitive “for what” that closes off inquiry, but at most an order that responds to a certain criterion—perhaps analogous to what we call the beautiful, which I have used precisely as an example—without that criterion referring to a deeper reason that would justify it. If the world were, in this sense, the manifestation of a form or a quality, it would not be so in view of anything further, but as the pure externalization of that consistency. There would then be no goal to be attained nor ultimate meaning to be deciphered, but only the possibility of inhabiting and contemplating that order, without any final ground concealed behind it.

Now, if one were to accept—even provisionally—that the universe bears this dimension of offering, then human existence could be thought less as a task of justification and more as a capacity for reception. Not in the passive sense of one who merely receives, but in the more demanding sense of one who knows how to dispose oneself. For what is offered does not impose itself: it may pass unnoticed, buried beneath the inertia of an attention constantly directed elsewhere.

Here the problem of the present becomes tense once again—not as a moral injunction, but as a condition of possibility. Beauty—if that word still retains any precision—does not allow itself to be experienced in deferment. It cannot be accumulated or anticipated. It demands a form of presence that does not coincide with vigilance or effort, but with an openness that, paradoxically, cannot be forced.

To say, then, that life is a gift risks becoming banal if it is understood as a comforting formula. But if it is taken in its most radical sense, it implies something more unsettling: that what is given requires no justification, and that it is precisely this gratuity that makes it difficult to assume within a logic accustomed to measuring, comparing, and deserving. There is no prior condition that legitimizes experience; it is experience itself that, in its occurrence, institutes its value.

To accept the invitation—if we wish to preserve that figure—is not to adhere to a belief, but to modify a disposition. To learn to be present not as one who awaits something more, but as one who recognizes that, in what already is, there is a density that usually escapes us. To open oneself to the ordinary not as resignation, but as access to a dimension that, by virtue of its very proximity, becomes almost invisible.

And yet, that openness guarantees nothing. There is no promise of permanence, nor of stabilized meaning. Only the possibility—always fragile, always contingent—that, for an instant, something might allow itself to be seen without being immediately reduced to function, to means, to transition. Perhaps it is there, in that minimal interruption, that a different way of inhabiting what we are is at stake.

The Paradox of the Ephemeral

There is an affective tonality that imposes itself almost without mediation when we become aware of transience: a faint melancholy, as if the consciousness of the fleeting introduced a fissure into experience. The flower that inevitably withers, the instant that dissolves as soon as it occurs, life itself which does not escape a limit—all of this seems to suggest an anticipated loss. Yet this reading, as immediate as it is misleading, inverts the direction of the problem. It is not finitude that impoverishes what is lived; rather, it is its most intense condition of possibility.

For the finite is not simply that which ends, but that which cannot be replaced without remainder. In its irrepeatable character, each experience is invested with a density that the infinite, understood as mere prolongation, could not provide. Martin Heidegger formulates this in more radical terms: it is being-toward-death that opens the possibility of an authentic existence—not as an obsession with the end, but as the understanding that each moment is traversed by a finitude that singularizes it. Death does not then appear at the end of life, but as its constant background, that which prevents any moment from being indifferent.

From this perspective, impermanence ceases to be a deficiency. It does not merely tell us that everything passes, but that nothing can be lived twice in the same register. And in that impossibility, a tacit task is introduced: not to treat the irrepeatable as if it were interchangeable. Yet our habitual economy of attention operates in the opposite direction: we take for granted what is present, as if its presence were guaranteed, as if its loss were not already inscribed in its very appearance.

Here the paradox emerges with greater clarity: that which is destined to disappear is, precisely for that reason, what most calls for our attention. Not because it will be lost—everything is lost—but because its loss is absolute, without possible compensation. Transience is not a defect of the real, an imperfection to be corrected; it is its mode of givenness. The beautiful does not endure despite its transience; it is constituted through it.

Accepting this does not entail immediate serenity. There is, in this recognition, a persistent unease: nothing that matters can be secured. But at the same time, a different way of relating to the world opens up—not one based on appropriation or duration, but on a kind of intensified attention, in which what appears is neither consumed nor instrumentalized, but allowed to be in its own fragility. Gratitude, wonder, even respect—words often worn down by overuse—might here recover a more precise depth: not as decorative emotions, but as modes of situating oneself before what cannot be retained.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in Duino Elegies, articulates an intuition that, far from being naïve, approaches the extreme: “to be here is glorious” (Hiersein ist herrlich). This is not a sentimental exaltation of existence, but an affirmation that only acquires its meaning when thought under the condition of finitude. That something is—even for a limited time, even in an imperfect manner—is not a trivial fact, but an event whose very improbability renders it significant.

From this perspective, transience does not diminish the value of life; it intensifies it. And yet, this understanding does not stabilize. It rarely becomes a form of available knowledge that can be applied at will. It remains as a tension: between the tendency to forget—to treat the present as if it were renewable—and the always fragile possibility of recognizing that, within that very fragility, what is most proper to experience is at stake.

The Future as a Trap of Meaning

Albert Einstein once remarked—almost in passing, on the margins of his more rigorous formulations—an image that resists trivialization: “life is like riding a bicycle: to keep your balance, you must keep moving.” Read superficially, the phrase seems to celebrate the continuity of momentum; yet it contains a more fertile ambiguity. What does it mean “to move”? Not necessarily to advance toward a fixed point, nor to progress along a line culminating in a destination. Balance is not a future goal, but a constant modulation in the present. The movement that sustains life is not that which projects it outside itself, but that which maintains it in tension with itself, in an instability that does not resolve.

And yet, we have learned to interpret this movement in teleological terms. The future erects itself as the axis of intelligibility: without it, we tell ourselves, everything would lack purpose. This intuition—so widespread as it is insufficiently examined—presupposes that meaning must be located outside the very act of living, as if life required an external instance to legitimize it. But as we have noted, the future—that horizon laden with promises—is nothing more than an operative construction, an artifact of the imagination that organizes action without possessing any independent entity. This is not to deny its function, but to deactivate its claim to sovereignty.

When this logic is carried to its ultimate consequences, a discomfort emerges that is difficult to evade. As noted earlier, no project, however vast, escapes the erosion of time. We may imagine the expansion of humanity into other worlds, the colonization of Mars, the exploration of distant stellar systems, the establishment of a technically refined and materially prosperous civilization. Yet even these projections, at their most ambitious scale, are inscribed within a finite temporality. There will come a point—no matter how remote—at which there will likely be no one left to remember, nor any consciousness capable of receiving what today appears so decisive to us, whether through extinction or through a radical transformation of what exists and of the forms of consciousness that might inhabit the future.

At this point, the question shifts: it is no longer whether our actions will endure, but why we require that they do in order to consider them valuable. The very idea of transcendence, understood as indefinite permanence, reveals its conceptual fragility. What does it mean to transcend if there is no instance to receive that transcendence? For whom would it be? The aspiration to leave a trace seems to presuppose a future spectator who guarantees meaning. But that spectator is, ultimately, as contingent as we are.

At this juncture, it is suggestive to invert the usual direction of the imagination. Not to think of civilizations that expand without limit, but of those that, having reached a high degree of development, choose not to do so. That remain. Not out of incapacity, but out of a certain lucidity: the recognition that expansion does not necessarily add intensity to experience. A civilization that decides not to conquer, not to perpetuate itself at any cost, but to inhabit its world with a refined attentiveness, might appear—within our logic—stagnant. Yet perhaps this relative immobility conceals another form of dynamism: not that of indefinite growth, but that of deepening.

This possibility, almost never considered within dominant narratives of progress, introduces a shift in perspective: fulfillment does not strictly depend on the magnitude of the project, but on the quality of the relation to what is being done. And this inevitably returns us to the problem of the present. If the future is uncertain and, ultimately, incapable of bearing the weight of meaning on its own, then the insistence on deferring life toward it appears as a failed strategy.

To reconsider the foundation of existence does not entail adopting a contemplative attitude in the passive sense, nor withdrawing from the world in the form of an escapist spirituality. It entails, rather, a reorientation of intensity: a displacement of the center of gravity from what might be toward what is already taking place—toward what we can do in relation to our own lives, and toward the enjoyment of the project as such, unconditioned by its outcome. A life that cultivates this potential and the capacity for wonder is not a diminished life; it is a life that has ceased to depend on external conditions—such as the future, the gaze of others, or certain outcomes we call “successes”—in order to access its own density.

To say that life is its own end is not a reassuring slogan, but an assertion that deactivates the instrumental structure we tend to impose upon it. We do not live for something; we live, and in that living—if it is played out anywhere at all—meaning is at stake. The present is neither a means nor a prelude; it is the only place where anything can effectively take place. Everything else—future projects, goals, legacies—are possible modulations of that occurring, but not its foundation.

Faced with the immensity of time and the cosmos, the temptation to declare human life insignificant is understandable. Yet that insignificance is the result of a poorly framed comparison: measuring life according to criteria—duration, scale, permanence—that are foreign to it. That something does not endure does not render it irrelevant; it simply situates it within another logic, where value does not depend on extension, but on intensity.

To accept that there is no ultimate cosmic purpose does not devalue existence; it relieves it of a burden it could never sustain without distortion. It frees life from the obligation to justify itself before a nonexistent tribunal. And in that liberation, paradoxically, there opens the possibility of a more radical affirmation: that of a life which does not need to be anything other than what it is in order to have value and meaning.

Alan Watts expressed this with an image that, far from being exhausted by its clarity, continues to unfold its consequences: to interpret a melody is not to reach its final note. If it were, the entire piece of music would be subordinated to an ending that nullifies it. But no one listens to a piece with the sole intention that it should end; what matters is the unfolding, the modulation, the irrepeatable succession of tensions and resolutions.

Life, in this register, is not a trajectory toward a meaningful closure. It is rather a composition performed in real time, without a fully given score, in which each moment does not prepare the next in terms of finality, but makes it possible in terms of continuity. To reduce it to its outcome would be to ignore that which, in each moment, is already occurring with sufficient density.

As in music, value is neither added from the outside nor revealed at the end; it emerges in the very act of performance. In each note, in each pause, in each variation. To live, then, is not to advance toward a point at which something will finally be understood, but to inhabit the unfolding itself, with all its dissonances, its interruptions, its moments of intensity and of silence.

And perhaps only when this understanding ceases to be merely an idea and begins—even intermittently—to affect the way we are, does something like a non-deferred experience of life become possible. Not because we have resolved the problem of meaning, but because we have ceased to situate it exclusively elsewhere.

Happiness: From External Mirage to the Fullness of the Present

When someone asserts that life “is not important,” he is not describing life, but rather the framework from which he evaluates it. This gesture introduces, almost imperceptibly, an external instance that would function as a tribunal: something before which life ought to justify itself. Yet this exteriority is a useful fiction, not a reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, formulates this with a disarming austerity: “the sense of the world must lie outside the world.” If this claim is taken seriously, the consequence is not the search for that “outside,” but the suspicion that any demand for meaning thus posed has already lost the very ground on which it might appear. Life does not present itself before a judgment; it happens. And within that happening lies everything that can be at stake.

This tendency to project an external criterion for judging life may also be understood as a form of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls bad faith: the attempt to evade the radical responsibility of existing by taking refuge in structures that feign objectivity. By situating meaning outside life, we illusorily relieve ourselves of the more demanding task of sustaining it from within our own experience. Yet this operation not only fails to provide a foundation; it also introduces a division: life is relegated to a lower plane, while the supposed meaning remains perpetually deferred, inaccessible. The result is nothing other than a subtle form of alienation, in which what is lived loses density in the face of what is imagined.

From my perspective, value does not require further justification nor does it refer to an end that transcends it. Rather, it manifests in the very structure of experience (reward), insofar as certain configurations of living present themselves as more complete, more coherent, or more intensely meaningful than others (self-esteem–happiness). It is not that there exists an ultimate “for the sake of which” grounding this difference; rather, reality itself—in its mode of givenness—offers gradients of meaning that do not require external legitimation. Reward is not here a contingent addition, but the manner in which value is inscribed within experience (Propositions).

The problem is not that we aspire to something more, but that we confuse this “more” with a transcendent validation. Prestige, for instance, acquires its luster when it is imagined as an inscription in a memory that exceeds us, as if occupying a place in the history of the universe—that disproportionate abstraction—could confer a density that immediate experience would otherwise lack. Yet the universe, in its indifferent scale, does not harbor human hierarchies. There is no cosmic instance that records our merits. The aspiration to be “relevant” in this sense borders on the absurd—not because of its ambition, but because of its misformulation.

Along similar lines, Thomas Nagel observes that the tension between our aspirations to importance and the indifference of the universe should not be resolved through despair, but through a form of lucid irony. In The View from Nowhere, he suggests that the capacity to contemplate our own pretensions from an impersonal perspective does not invalidate them, but does reconfigure them. What appears absurd from a certain distance does not necessarily lose its value in the immediacy of lived life. This double awareness—participating and, at the same time, relativizing—allows us to sustain our commitments without absolutizing them, thereby avoiding both grandiloquence and nihilism.

By contrast, when an action is sustained in its own exercise—when someone gives himself over to an activity that concerns him, that absorbs him, that does not require justification beyond its own unfolding—something different occurs. It is not a matter of renouncing secondary effects—recognition, results, consequences—but of displacing them from their position as foundation. In this kind of involvement there is a form of enjoyment that does not depend on comparison or projection—not because it is more vivid, but because it is not mediated by an expectation that defers it.

This type of involvement finds an empirical correlate in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow experience”: a state in which action and consciousness are integrated in such a way that the activity becomes autotelic—that is, valuable in itself. In such experiences, reference to the self as evaluator is attenuated, and with it the absolute need to justify what one does in terms of a future or a determinate outcome. This is not an evasion of reality, but an intensification of presence within it. The enjoyment that emerges from this state does not depend on future results or external validation, but on the internal coherence of the action itself.

To say that there are already sufficient reasons to be happy does not imply trivializing the complexity of life or proposing a kind of naïve hedonism. Rather, it implies recognizing that happiness cannot be reduced to a state that is attained and preserved. It is, instead, a quality of the mode of relation to what occurs. Projects—personal, collective, even those that span generations—are not excluded from this understanding. They form part of the landscape of a life that unfolds. Yet their value does not reside in a final result that legitimates them, but in the manner in which they are inhabited.

The emotions that accompany these processes—enthusiasm, satisfaction, even fulfillment—are, like everything else, transient. To attempt to fix them is to misunderstand their nature. Baruch Spinoza, in the Ethics, had already shown that affects are not static states, but variations in the power of existing. They are not possessed; they are undergone. The task does not consist in retaining them, but in understanding the conditions under which they emerge, in cultivating a disposition that does not depend on their continual permanence.

From a contemporary perspective, Daniel Kahneman has shown that even our memory of happiness is subject to systematic distortions. In his distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self,” he demonstrates that we tend to evaluate our lives not by the totality of what is lived, but by punctual and terminal moments. This tendency reinforces the illusion that happiness can be captured and stabilized, when in fact it consists of a series of instants whose richness is fully accessible only at the moment of their occurrence. To rely exclusively on memory as a measure of well-being is, in this sense, another form of distancing from direct experience.

From this standpoint, notions such as attachment, insignificance, and impermanence cease to be problems to be solved and instead become dimensions to be understood. That which we love—places, people, moments—was not always there. It emerged, took shape, affected us. Our bond with it is not the result of permanence, but of a process. To attempt to fix it, to arrest it, to exempt it from change, is to disregard the very dynamic that made it possible. There is in this gesture a form of resistance that is not only futile, but also impoverishes experience.

Resistance to impermanence may likewise be understood as a difficulty in assuming what Martin Hägglund calls “finite temporality.” In This Life, he argues that the value of what matters to us depends precisely on its vulnerability to time. If the things we love were eternal and immutable, they would lack the urgency and significance we currently attribute to them. Finitude, therefore, is not an obstacle to meaning, but a condition that intensifies it. To love something is, ultimately, to expose oneself to its loss, but also to affirm that it is worthwhile nonetheless.

To accept impermanence is not to resign oneself, but to reconfigure one’s relation to what is given. What constitutes us today will, at another time, be the world of others—not as loss, but as continuity under different forms. Change is not an anomaly in the structure of the real; it is its condition. To resist it is, in a certain sense, to resist the very possibility that anything might occur.

Hence, the insistence on absolute goals, rigid deadlines, and closed structures of fulfillment introduces an unnecessary tension. Not because objectives lack value, but because their absolutization distorts the way in which we live their process. To slow down does not mean to withdraw, but to recalibrate attention. To perceive the ordinary—what usually goes unnoticed—as bearing its own density requires a disposition that cannot be accelerated.

Within social theory, Hartmut Rosa has described this phenomenon as a crisis of “acceleration” affecting both our institutions and our subjective lives. According to Rosa, the constant increase in the speed of production, communication, and change generates an instrumental relation to the world, in which everything must be optimized and utilized. In response, he proposes the notion of “resonance”: a mode of relation in which the subject neither dominates nor controls experience, but enters into a reciprocal relation with it. This idea aligns with the need to decelerate not as a form of renunciation, but as a condition for the genuine emergence of what is meaningful.

To recognize the precariousness of life as something akin to a miracle is not a rhetorical hyperbole. It is an acknowledgment that, when not immediately neutralized by habit, transforms the way in which things present themselves—not by adding meaning, but by suspending the need to seek it outside experience itself.

Now, if meaning is conditioned upon a future that is not yet, the consequence is almost inevitable: when that future becomes actual, it does not satisfy. Either expectation is displaced toward a new horizon—thus reproducing the logic of dissatisfaction—or one reaches a point at which there is nothing left to anticipate, at which point the void is revealed of having grounded the entire structure upon something that never possessed consistency of its own.

This structure of indefinite postponement bears an affinity with what Sigmund Freud identified as the logic of desire: a dynamic sustained not so much by the attainment of its object as by its continual displacement. Fulfillment, far from bringing desire to a close, tends instead to reactivate it in new forms. If life becomes subordinated to this logic without mediation, it is transformed into a chain of expectations that never achieve full resolution. To recognize this mechanism does not entail eliminating the desire to attain things in the future, but rather preventing it from becoming the sole organizing principle of existence.

Nevertheless, a Nietzschean critique of this diagnosis would not be long in coming. Nietzsche would not object to the identification of a life subordinated to future fictions, but he would be suspicious of any gesture that, in the name of lucidity, attenuates the intensity of willing. Where indefinite postponement reveals a form of impotence, there might also be—on his view—a weakening of the will, a renunciation of the creative tension that drives life beyond itself. It is not desire that ought to be moderated, but its degraded form: that which depends on promise rather than affirmation.

In this sense, the constant self-overcoming that Nietzsche proposes is not oriented toward a future that would come to justify the present, but unfolds as an intensification of the present itself. There is here no teleology that redeems effort, nor a final goal that brings movement to a close. Each overcoming is not a means to something else, but a way of affirming one’s own power in act. The difference is subtle yet decisive: whereas the logic of expectation displaces value toward what is not yet, the logic of self-overcoming (or the notions of self-esteem–happiness I develop in Propositions) concentrates it in the manner of becoming. What might, in a cursory reading, appear as an apology for constant becoming is in fact a critique of every form of deferral that impoverishes present experience, and an affirmation of the reward and enjoyment involved in cultivating self-esteem–happiness, which may eventually give rise to long-term states of reward, but whose pleasure resides in its cultivation here and now.

From this angle, deceleration would not, for Nietzsche, constitute a value in itself. It could even become an alibi for avoiding the conflict inherent in any genuine transformation. What would matter is not so much the pace as the quality of the force that traverses it: whether it is a force that creates, that risks, that exposes itself to the instability of the new, or one that withdraws into the preservation of a seamless equilibrium. The objection, then, does not dismantle what precedes it, but introduces an irreducible tension: between a life that seeks to reconcile itself with what is, and another that never ceases to overflow it.

This dynamic of futurity is not abstract; it permeates the everyday. How often is the value of an experience suspended until something else occurs? How often is enjoyment postponed under the premise that it is “not yet the moment”? The present thus becomes subordinated to an instance that, when it arrives, repeats the same operation. The result is not only the loss of what is lived, but the establishment of a habit: that of never being where one is.

Recognizing this mechanism does not automatically dissolve it, but it does introduce a brake. It allows us to question the legitimacy of certain expectations, to relieve the burden of a regret that presupposes things could have been otherwise under a control that never existed. The idea of absolute mastery over one’s own life—that demand that everything follow a course aligned with our projections—thus reveals itself as a fiction that, far from empowering, rigidifies.

It is on this terrain that what is now presented as the “happiness industry” thrives: a dispositif that, under the promise of well-being, feeds on the dissatisfaction it helps to produce. The more the idea is reinforced that something is always lacking—an improvement, an optimization—the more the circuit consolidates itself. Unhappiness here is not a problem to be solved, but a condition of operation. In this context, a more minimalist philosophy—a “less is more” approach—becomes almost subversive.

This critique also resonates with Eva Illouz’s analysis, which has shown how the contemporary economic system has incorporated emotional language into its market logic. In works such as Saving the Modern Soul, she argues that the pursuit of authenticity and well-being has been progressively codified in terms of performance and continuous improvement. There is nothing inherently wrong with improvement; the problem lies in its quality and its mode. To improve does not mean to burn oneself out in hyper-demand, but to grow in wisdom, to actualize a potential, to engage in self-overcoming—something that can also proceed by way of removing noise and the unnecessary from one’s life, within the context of a reduced pace of living. It does not entail rejecting growth, nor abandoning the care of the different dimensions of life. But it does require a precision that is often omitted: it is not a matter of becoming “complete” through something that will come, but of recognizing that any significant transformation occurs upon a base that already is. The idea of permanent incompleteness is, in many cases, a mechanism of capture.

The key, then, does not consist in attaining a state as such, but in deactivating a form of waiting. As long as happiness depends on a future moment, it will remain structurally deferred. Even when it arrives, it will not be able to sustain itself. Difficulties do not disappear; life does not stabilize at an optimal point. But postponing the possibility of a different relation to what occurs only prolongs dissatisfaction.

At this point, it becomes possible to reformulate the question of meaning in terms that are at once less demanding and more rigorous. As Albert Camus suggests, the recognition of the potentially absurd character of existence does not necessarily lead to negation, but can instead open a space for lucid affirmation. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the absence of an ultimate meaning is not presented as a lack to be remedied, but as a condition that enables a different form of freedom: that of living without appeal to transcendent foundations. In this absence of guarantee, life does not lose its value; if anything, it becomes more radically our own.

Learning to live happiness now does not mean imposing an emotional state, but allowing experience to take place without being immediately subordinated to something else. Life is not in the next achievement nor in the distant horizon that promises it. It is here—not as a slogan, but as a fact—in this unrepeatable configuration that, however ordinary it may seem, will not occur again in the same way.

And perhaps only from this acknowledgment does something like a less dependent form of fullness become possible. Not a fullness understood as culmination, but as sufficiency: that of a life which, without needing to justify itself beyond itself, can, at least at times, coincide with its own happening.

Life—like a flower in its moment of fullness—does not require indefinite prolongation nor legitimation through external criteria such as productivity or utility. Its meaning is not something to be added, but something that unfolds in its very happening. It exists insofar as it is lived, insofar as it can be perceived, undergone, and appreciated without mediations that subordinate it to ulterior ends. As human beings, we possess the singular capacity to register this condition: we do not merely participate in life, we can also recognize its intrinsic value. From this lucidity, a decisive possibility opens: to orient our attention—and with it, our energy—toward what truly matters, that is, toward the irreducible density of each experience that configures our existence.

Whether the universe responds to an originating intelligence or emerges from impersonal and contingent processes, the structure of our experience remains unchanged: we inhabit a world susceptible to being lived as meaningful. Yet that meaning is not guaranteed; it depends, to a large extent, on our disposition to perceive it. It is not a matter of discovering a hidden meaning, but of ceasing to veil what is already given. Our task, then, does not consist in transcending reality, but in inhabiting it with a fuller presence: attending, enjoying, entering into relation with what is, without demanding that it be otherwise. For what is truly scarce is neither the future nor the promises we project onto it, but this very instant—always fleeting, always unrepeatable—in which life, silently, unfolds.

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