Living in the moment

Why must we be so obsessed with the past and the future?

In Brian Friel’s play The Freedom of the City (1973), three protesters take shelter in Derry’s Guildhall after security forces suppress a civil rights march with CS gas. We know that the trio will eventually be killed, mistaken for terrorists who have occupied the Mayor’s parlour, because the play begins in the midst of tribunal into the matter of their deaths. At one point, Dr Philip Dodds, a sociologist specialising in the culture of poverty, explains to the court that the three victims, being working-class, were more likely to be “present-time orientated”. That is to say, unlike wealthy members of society who are forever seeking a more prosperous future, the poor tend to focus on the here and now.

There is a sense in which Dodds is romanticising the poor, but there is a valid point buried within the condescension. Studies suggest that depression is more common in wealthier countries, but why should this be the case? Dodds contends that in resigning themselves to the reality that their lives are unlikely to improve, the poorest in society have perhaps struck upon a means to achieve relative happiness. This is how he puts it:

“Present-orientated living… may sharpen one’s attitude for spontaneity and for excitement, for the appreciation of the sensual, for the indulgence of impulse; and these aptitudes are often blunted or muted in people like us who are middle-class and future-orientated. So that to live in the culture of poverty is, in a sense, to live with the reality of the moment – in other words to practise a sort of existentialism. The result is that people with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle-class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.”

This will come as little consolation to those on the breadline, overworked and underpaid, struggling to keep their lives afloat during a cost of living crisis. But there is surely something in the temptation to fixate on the future that is essentially self-destructive.