Nate Hagens

These layered simulations probably multiply the load that we carry.

Fourth,

Our vocation itself requires default mode network engagement.

If you're a metacrisis researcher or writer or just an attentive citizen, your job is to run the simulations.

You cannot stop.

The DMN is your professional instrument or tool.

So the very mode that is eating our present life is the mode our work depends on.

So lastly, and this one, well, they all do, but this one really hits home because it implicates me directly.

There is a moral dimension that licenses the absence.

The metacrisis aware person can rationalize, often correctly, that their preoccupation with the future is necessary and appropriate.

that being fully present at a birthday party while the world burns would be kind of an obscenity or feel that way.

This is the trap because it's easy to feel like it's the only logical conclusion.

The moral seriousness that drives this work enables or licenses chronic absence from one's own life.

And then the absence becomes a sign of how much one cares.

But I've learned absence is not care.

Absence is absence.

And the children growing up next to an absent parent will not remember that the parent was thinking important thoughts.

They will remember that the parent was not there.

The metacrisis-aware mind often experiences default mode network time as more real than present time because the DMN content, collapse and contraction and loss and intervention, that all feels weightier than the apparent triviality of the present moment, the dinner or the weather or the cat.

I recently came to see this as a sort of inversion of reality.