The Danger of Always Looking Ahead

Anxiety is an existential hazard - alienation doesn't have to be

I recently came across a photo of myself when I was 10 years old. It was Halloween and I had decided to go as a doctor. I'm posing with my hands raised, pretending to be freshly scrubbed ready to go into the OR with gloves stretched against my chubby fingers. I can't see my expression behind my surgical mask but I'm sure it's one of exasperation as my mom snaps her hundredth photo of me. Back then, the only things I'd wait for were dungeon raids in World of Warcraft, Sour Cream and Onion chips, and episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh (in that order). As I look up from that photo with varying waves of cringe and nostalgia, I'm suddenly struck at how much my life has been consumed with thoughts of the future.

In some ways, looking ahead is built within the structure of medical training. From high school to the terminal stages of fellowship (a process spanning at least 15 years), you're consistently incentivized to subjugate the present for future achievement. Aspiration becomes the sine qua non of a life worth living. Mix this with immigrant parents, and you've got yourself a recipe for self-sustaining existential anxiety. This is not always bad, per se. In many ways, a fear of falling short of the expectations that have implicitly (and explicitly) been created for you can motivate and initiate great, even life-altering, things. Yet, even though these constructions don't technically exist except in the abstract, they concretize into weights that you can unknowingly carry your entire life. Anxiety looms in the background and self-replicates as if it were a virus integrating into its host's DNA. Once integrated, you can no longer detect that it's there - anxiety becomes a psychological feature of daily existence.

This is the danger of always looking ahead.

Guy Debord, French filmmaker and philosopher, belonged to a group of artists, intellectuals, and theorists known as the Situationists that featured prominently in European political movements in the 1960s such as the May '68 protests in France. Fundamental to Situationist theory is the concept of the Spectacle, most famously articulated in Debord's 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. In this work, Debord claims that, as a result of the political economy of late capitalist modernity, human social relations have increasingly become to be defined by the process of representation and mediation through images. In other words, direct, tangible experiences of people or phenomena are obscured and substituted by indirect experiences. Examples abound in modern life. Instagram is probably the most prominent example. A snapshot of someone's life experience is presented to you indirectly via a virtual image hosted by a third party mediator (in this case, Meta). Another great example is the movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour - the movie is the very definition of a series of images indirectly substituting for the direct experience of going to her concert (obviously hard to do when the tickets are $1000s). Food YouTube is yet another example - videos of Mukbangs or charismatic hosts eating street food in Bangkok provide that same process of substitution, once again, through images.

Although Debord might be mortified at Instagram or YouTube, this is not to say that these are inherently good or bad things. Rather, these processes are now a major part of how we relate to ourselves and one another. I do, however, think that there are negative consequences. When an increasing percentage of your waking moments are characterized by indirect experiences, you begin to feel a growing sense of disconnection from the world around you. Slowly, a steady feeling of alienation paints the frames you've created to make sense of the world. You begin to look ahead more and more, as staying present becomes harder to do and your needs are met less frequently. Moreover, as society becomes more complex, our ability to predict the future becomes even worse than it already is. You may not even be aware of these feelings as they become endemic to your life, aided and abetted by these larger social forces.

Anxiety is an existential hazard of being alive - we naturally have hopes and desires for how our lives will turn out and become disappointed if they don't pan out. Alienation, that feeling of progressive disconnection, however, is not inevitable. I've found ways that recenter me in presence. In writing and sharing these thoughts, or engaging in a wonderful conversation with a friend, or concentrating on a patient's story, I connect to direct experience. These opportunities come nearly daily and my ability to engage with them waxes and wanes. But I've found that when I do, my mind doesn't wade as frequently into uncertainties and I feel less of a need to escape into a world of images that surrounds me.