Nate Hagens

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.

The default mode network content is modeled.

The present moment is actual.

However, our felt sense of importance reverses this.

The model feels solid and the present feels watered down and uninteresting to us.

I'm assuming that many of you are tracking this and feel like I'm describing.

I think this inversion is one of the central pathologies of how this work has trained our minds.

Not all absence is the same, because some forward thinking is necessary when you plan and you model and you strategize.

The surgeon that did my knee surgery had to visualize the operation.

The farmers around here, despite fertilizer up 50% in cost, they have to think about next season.

So the mark of healthy mental time travel is that you can leave the present, do the work elsewhere and come back.

The traveling mind returns.

And there's a second kind, which we might call drift.

The mind wanders because the present has become less compelling than the simulations.

Drift is what's happening when we scroll, when you're at dinner and not at dinner.

And then there's a third kind, which I'll label it future capture.