It has become hard to be intentional about the future — to imagine and shape the worlds we want to live in — because the modern state rarely assumes any role in doing that or in encouraging us to do it either.
whether you are “behind” or “ahead” is a delusion. others should serve as inspiration and a little healthy rivalry to fuel to your fire, but only one competitor can stop you: yourself. everything else is a distraction—a way to attribute your internal agency to something external:
Pessimists see problems. They worry about what could go wrong in the future. Optimists see possibilities. They focus on what could go right in the future. Proactive people turn problems into possibilities. They give us reasons to be optimistic about the future.
"Proactive people turn problems into possibilities. They give us reasons to be optimistic about the future."
our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to commit is a deeper kind of temporal fragmentation—the self splintering into a thousand disconnected moments instead of flowing through time as a continuous “I”. It’s fascinating to turn this idea... See more