I used to mock this idea of living in the moment, except it’s actually a very powerful psychological position to take. Let me explain why.
Initially, living in the present seems like ignoring everything else past and future, all the meaning and value and importance of that. Including relevant and meaningful memories and lessons from the past, and important planning for the future. And yes, it is basically ignoring all that. So how can that be good or helpful? Well first in the obvious sense that it allows you to disconnect mentally-emotionally from any painful experiences in the past or future. Painful memories, failures, and then future anxieties, you can leave those behind if you simply “live in the now” as so many new age guru wawa books and perspectives out there tell you to do.
But it’s not only about ignoring bad things, it is also about cutting off from meaning. Or rather, cutting off from the foundations of meaning that always exist and from which momentary meaning comes. Take Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we are supposed to have basic needs met before tackling higher level needs. If we lack food or financial security or basic human socialization then how are we supposed to be satisfied in life and achieve higher values and meanings? The lacks gnaw at us and we end up seeking to satisfy these first. The problem with that is, because they are already more essentially unsatisfied (since we are in this position to begin with) we end up applying little tricks to ourselves to try and make it feel like we are satisfied in these areas when we really aren’t. This promotes a lot of self-deception and half-solutions that don’t really work.
Living in the moment means you drop all that self-deception and just accept whatever is in the moment. This means, in that moment if you have everything you need on a basic level then your hierarchy of needs is satisfied. You don’t need to worry about earlier in the day or tomorrow. You are satisfied NOW and so satisfaction becomes a continuous string of momentary now’s. This doesn’t mean you don’t also plan for the future and try to make the best decisions you can for planning for the future, and it doesn’t mean you don’t take the past into consideration. What it is really doing is forcing a bit of a disconnect between your emotional foundational framework that underlies meaningfulness on the one hand, and your mind-cognition on the other hand. Emotions are suddenly unburdened of anything that’s not happening right now, and your mind is unburdened of having to worry and perseverate about all that past and future stuff.
Psychologically and in terms of mood this is very effective, and I think it has some parallels in other areas including physics and spirituality. The idea of collapsing energy to a small point thus concentrating it. How could that not have a big impact? Mental clarity and emotional unburdening seem likely to also function as some sort of spiritual precursors or prerequisite conditions for whatever kind of more spiritual-supernatural or metaphysical engagements one might wish to engage in. Or think about it in terms of physics, you focus all the energy of light in just a square inch of air down to a single point on the ground and you form a laser that can start fires. Or think about what occurs in a nuclear bomb explosion, all of that released energy from the atoms is being concentraed back down into a single center point and pressured into that center until… a sun is born.
I suppose all the new agers did have a point after all. Living in the moment has its uses. But what about from the point of view of philosophy and truth?
Living in the moment can be seen as a psychological mind-state to cause emotional and mental unburdening, which can in turn facilitate greater philosophical interest and motivation. Understanding how and why this works is what acts as a psychic-valuational bridge between both states, i.e. between living in the moment and philosophizing without such limitations. You need to bridge that gap with sufficient scope and power of meaning of understanding in order to not erect some sort of weird barrier inside of yourself. Then energies can groove and flow in both directions and you can merely shift yourself to one side or the other as needed based on the relevant factors, needs and situational dynamics of the moment. So in a way we are talking about a kind of meta-framework for energetic cross-categorical meaning stabilizations. What is philosophy itself, and what does philosophy require for its own proper activities, than this very thing in one way or another? All it seems we are doing here is building larger structures of mind sufficient to take philosophizing to new levels.