Nate Hagens

And I would bet I'm not alone in this.

I have lived this kind of absence for a long time.

You could say I have had a front row seat to this particular cost.

And the work that I do has depended on it.

It's probably cost me more than I have recognized until recently, and I'll come back to that later.

Nate Hagenshaw, When you spend 20 years modeling futures,

Your mind develops habits and it drifts forward in time.

And my brain runs scenarios when it has nothing else to do.

It runs scenarios when it does have something else to do.

It runs them while you're eating, while you're on a hike, while you're watching the dawn light come up.

And the habit is probably what has allowed this work.

but it has a cost.

The only place life ever actually occurs, which is here now, this breath, this meal becomes a place you visit only briefly between these simulations.

And the neuroscience here, which I've dove into recently, matters.

And I'm going to start with that because deep within the brains of Homo sapiens lies both the generator and the viable responses to the more than human predicament.

There's a study I recently learned about two psychologists at Harvard sampled the moment to moment experience of thousands of adults, like a quarter million moments via a phone app.

And they ping them at random throughout the day and ask, What are you doing?

What are you thinking about?

And how do you feel?

And what they found was remarkable.