Why “Living in the Now” Is a Fallacy

The idea of living in the now never made much sense to me. I can only tell afterward whether I was living in the moment, never before or during. It’s essentially a third‑person description. Why can’t I simply choose it? Because the moment you try, it becomes a deliberate act, and the whole premise of “living in the now” is to exist outside that sort of self‑conscious effort. Whether you focus on today, tomorrow, or yesterday makes no difference; privileging one inevitably brings the others into view because the concept is dialectical. “Ah, I’m living in the present moment” works the same way as “Don’t think of the white elephant.”

This isn’t to say Eastern spiritual teachers are just bluffing. The phrase itself is self‑contradictory: to live in the moment would require having no sense of time, yet the instruction forces you to think precisely about time. It’s no wonder Westerners get tangled up by it.

And there is no “solution,” because solving is itself a conscious act, which only deepens the very trap you’re trying to escape. You can’t reach the present moment by declaring, “I finally solved it. I’m here now,” nor by lamenting, “It’s not working; I’m not in the moment.” None of that helps. So what’s the solution? Here’s the irony: you have to stop caring about the idea altogether.

But if this whole issue produces suffering, Jacques Lacan gives you a way to manage it, not to make you happy, but to make the suffering livable, and to help you understand why you cling to it.

The so‑called arrival fallacy, the belief that future happiness will redeem present suffering, is precisely how fantasy functions. Once you understand this mechanism, the suffering becomes bearable, and even enjoyable. Think about why you like games.

Take Monopoly. The game is mostly frustration: missing the square you want, landing in jail, paying taxes you can’t afford, watching others block your plans. And when the game ends, there’s no blissful reward. You’re not vacationing with Monopoly money. No one admires you. It’s simply over. So why play? Because the structure of frustration is enjoyable.

This is what Lacan called “traversing the fantasy”: recognizing how fantasy organizes your desire. Once you do, you see that the promised future happiness is useful, not because it will actually deliver happiness, but because it gives structure to your everyday suffering, much like Monopoly.

Say your fantasy is having an affair with a sexy man or woman. If you literally “lived in the moment,” you’d pursue it impulsively, empty your bank account and go all‑in. But if you succeeded, the enjoyment would vanish, just like winning Monopoly ends the fun. The pleasure lies in imagining it, not in the act itself. When you’re winning in your mind, you don’t rush to end the game. The fact that you are stuck with an ugly spouse becomes a source of enjoyment.

This ends up being a far more practical approach to the very issue Eastern gurus point to, one they ultimately can’t resolve. For instance, they commonly use meditation as the purest form of “being in the present moment.” It’s hard to argue that meditation isn’t “living in the moment.” But if this state is so ideal, then in theory you should do nothing but meditate. Don’t bother doing anything else. Yet you can’t; you’d starve. Maybe that’s fine in the abstract, but nobody actually chooses that path.

So this pure state of being fully in the now appears incompatible with survival. That implies the so-called impure state, where you’re not fully present, is necessary. Meditation then becomes a tool to cope with a condition we treat as undesirable. You meditate because you’re overwhelmed by life’s demands: taking responsibility for what you’ve already done and planning for what you must do. The present moment becomes a refuge from the past and future that burden you.

In that sense, it works. This is why people love meditation retreats or weekly meditation groups: they allow a breather so they can return to everyday stress and remain functional. But this just makes meditation another version of fantasy or “arrival fallacy,” where you endure daily stress by fantasizing about an imagined escape.

Lacan’s point is that the arrival fallacy itself is what makes life enjoyable (although he never used that term). You wouldn’t want a life without it. It would be like playing Monopoly with no objective. You’d ask, “What’s the goal here?” and I’d answer, “There is none, just keep circling the board and live in the moment.” The problem isn’t the fantasy; the problem is believing the fantasy actually means something, attaching your ego to it, idealizing it or defending it. That’s what produces stress and suffering. If you don’t attach yourself to your fantasy, winning or losing it, you can enjoy the process of striving. You’d stop counting on the moment of “arrival” while pursuing it.

We are blaming the past/future and romanticizing the now because of one fundamental misdiagnosis. The so-called “attention economy” has reached a point where the amount of attention demanded from us far exceeds what any normal person can reasonably give. Trying to keep up often leaves people feeling ignorant, out of touch, rude, or antisocial.

This, I think, is the real issue that gets mislabeled as a failure to “live in the now.” Many of us try to manage this pressure, cutting back on social media, prioritizing in‑person conversations, tuning out the news media, or setting personal boundaries so we aren’t pulled in every direction.

It’s useful to see this as a spectrum rather than a binary choice between total mindfulness and constant digital distraction. Everyone lives somewhere along that continuum. The closer you move toward the first pole, the more “present” you feel. The closer you drift toward the other, the more you feel pulled into past and future.

But here’s where the logic starts to wobble: being fully in the present isn’t inherently superior to thinking about the past or future. We only treat it that way because the pressures around us seem to demand fragmented attention. Social media becomes the convenient villain because it’s designed to pull your focus away from whatever is right in front of you.

The catch is that much of this pressure is illusory. You can ignore the news for days or weeks with no real consequence. Most of the “demands” on our attention are self‑generated. Blaming Instagram or TikTok is simply easier than admitting that we’re the ones overwhelming ourselves.

The desire to “live in the now” emerges as a reaction to this overload. The rules and boundaries we set are attempts to defend ourselves against what feels like an external force draining our attention, even if that force isn’t actually there.

So the misdiagnosis is thinking that society is imposing this problem on us. It isn’t. We are the ones manufacturing the pressure. And once that belief takes hold, “live in the now” becomes another internal conflict, a new strategy to protect ourselves from a demand that may not even exist.

There is nothing wrong with thinking about the past or future. It’s part of what makes life meaningful. We only moralize it because the perceived demand on our attention feels excessive. But because that demand is largely imaginary, we end up blaming the wrong things. Naturally, the problem never gets resolved.