Don't Let Planning Take Over Your Life Experience

Jesus said,

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34, NIV)

Interpreted naively, this is a bad idea. Thinking ahead can help us avoid bad outcomes. So what did Jesus mean? In context, one of the things Jesus meant is that you should have a higher goal than the type of goals many everyday worries are about:

Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24, KJV)

“Mammon” literally means “riches,” but let me extend the meaning to include social rank, so that anything we do primarily to advance our social rank (including our professional standing), counts as “serving mammon.” In the context of academia, the choice between “God” and “mammon” can be reinterpreted for nonsupernaturalists as something like what I wrote of in “Breaking the Chains”:

For most who go into academia, the salary they will get in academia is lower than they could get outside. So most who go into academia make that choice in part out of the joy of ideas, a burning desire for self-expression, a genuine fascination with learning how the world works, or out of idealism—the hope of making the world a better place through their efforts. But by the time those who are successful make it through the long grind of graduate school, getting a job and getting tenure, many have had that joy of ideas, desire for self-expression, thirst for understanding and idealism snuffed out. For many their work life has become a checklist of duties plus the narrow quest for publications in top journals. This fading away of higher, brighter goals betrays the reasons they chose academia in the first place.  

I see one other meaning in:

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

It really is possible to run or greatly worsen our inner experience by constantly thinking about what we need to do in the future. In my own life, I think of this as a “hypertrophy of the planning function.” My goal is to activate my internal Planner enough to genuinely optimize what to do next, as best I am able, and to determine how long to spend on that before I need to do the thing after that, but then to forget about what I am going to do in the future while I do the thing that appropriately comes next. When I can manage this, my experience is much better! And now at 61 years old, it is pretty optimistic to think I have even 39 years of flesh-and-blood life left, so I want to make every moment as good an experience as possible given my other goals. And other goals only have to come into optimizing what to do next and how long to do it for. Any other intrusion of the Planner into the scarce space I have for consciousness at any moment just makes my life worse.

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