it's the only time that exists
Sometimes I’ll find myself constantly anxious in terms of schoolwork about whether I’ll be able to finish my next project or how much work it will be, and then upon finishing it I’ll just look at the next due date and start worrying about that one instead. And going even further, even after finishing a semester and celebrating that “I’m finally done”, within a few days I’ll begin worrying about the next semester that will inevitably begin in a few weeks. People often complain about how stressful the world is these days. Well, if we all don't stop being so preoccupied with the future, this problem will only continue to get worse.
If we continuously keep our mindset within the constraints of the first examples, it can seem like we’re always in an endless cycle of anxiety, relief, and then anxiety again, where anxiety seems to always get the better end of the stick. But what’s a solution to this problem? It’s pretty simple, actually. It involves catching ourselves the moment we start thinking about the future (or past, for that matter) and to change our focus towards what’s currently happening in the present instead. It can seem quite tedious and useless at first, but after a while it becomes natural, and you’ll find that you have much more awareness and energy towards all of your everyday tasks.
Here is a short clip from a philosopher I found, Alan Watts. In this clip he goes over a similar idea, that we’re always reaching for some far-off goal in the future, and that even if we were to reach that goal we wouldn't be satisfied. To summarize, his main idea is: once you get to a point in time that you were, in the past, looking forward to, you’ll simply choose another point in the future to look forward to instead. We do this so often without noticing, however it’s easy to break out of it by choosing to live in the present, or to “take life one day at a time”.