Endless now

There’s something strange about how often we’re told to be present. Every app, every podcast, every scrap of self-help wisdom—it’s all nudging us to live in the now. No past regrets, no future anxieties. Just this moment. But there’s a certain kind of loneliness that doesn’t come from being alone. It comes from being turned into a thing.

We all know the feeling. We check our health ring and see the numbers: our HRV, our readiness score, our sleep stages. We open our finance app and see the graphs: our income, our net worth, our targets. We scroll through our feed and see our face, our friends, our wins—our life, stylised and flattened into curated updates.

We don’t ask who we’re becoming.

We ask how we’re performing.

This isn’t vanity. It’s not ego. And it’s not grabbing at some low-hanging fruit to trash talk social media. It’s something more invisible, more structural.

We’re being slowly conditioned to see ourselves not as subjects, but as objects.

A subject is someone you relate to—someone with an inner world, mystery, and agency. They can’t be fully known or predicted. They exist in process, in a state of becoming.

An object, by contrast, is something to be evaluated. Measured. Used. You don’t encounter it—you manage it.

And when we start to see ourselves as objects—something to optimise, brand, or fix—we inevitably begin to see others the same way.

Imagine a friend or family member on a wellness retreat. It’s something like Nine Perfect Strangers, only less culty, and the guests are allowed visitors. The staff have access to an extensive database on each guest: medical history, psychological assessments, dietary restrictions, biometric data, even detailed intake forms about traumas and relationships. Yet between the coffee enemas, ice baths, and sound healing sessions, the one person who really knows the guest is the friend who visits daily. The one who knows when they’re scared or hopeful. The one who understands their humour and fears.

The retreat sees the patient as a profile. The friend sees them as a person.

One sees an object. The other sees a subject—a story, unfolding over time.

We used to have a better understanding of our stories.

Not always good ones. Not always chosen. But ones with a past we felt connected to and a future we believed might still arrive. We could trace the shape of a life—what shaped us, what we were moving toward, what kind of person we were becoming.

Now? We live in loops.

Wake, track, scroll, select, reflect, repeat.

Life isn’t unfolding—it’s refreshing.

The present has been inflated to fill all of time. The past is reprocessed as data or diagnosis—your origin story reduced to “my trauma” or “my patterns.” The future isn’t a mystery anymore; it’s a funnel. A KPI. Something to optimise.

And the present? The present is just a performance. Curated, monetised, streamed to your followers—who are doing the exact same thing.

This is what happens when narrative collapses.

Because stories require time. They need causality. They need surprise.

And most dangerously of all—they need space for us to change.

Which is precisely what the present moment can’t allow.

The paradox of the current culture is this:

We’re allowed to be anything—so long as we’re not in process, and also never finished. Always optimising, never arriving.

We’re constantly told to present a whole, already complete, already figured-out version of ourselves—while simultaneously being coerced into a state of permanent incompletion. Because that’s what keeps us consuming, scrolling, striving.

It’s a system that hands us a desire structured by its own impossibility.

We’re not meant to arrive.

The result? That seasick feeling we live with daily.

Cut adrift from others—and from the narrative that once gave us context.

From the sense of how now fits into before, and what comes next.

Without narrative, we lose the subject.

A subject isn’t someone you understand. Not fully. Not neatly. They interrupt your expectations. They surprise you.

In ​The Plague of Fantasies​, ​Slavoj Žižek​ puts it like this:

"When do I actually encounter the Other beyond the wall of language, in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe."

It’s never the bio or the personal brand that reveals the subject. It’s the trembling of the hand. The laugh that goes on too long. The private absurdity that ruptures the curated self. And it’s always a bit much. It’s always a bit obscene—because you can’t manage it. You can’t integrate it. You can’t use it to optimise anything.

That’s what makes it real.

And once life becomes a series of optimisations, encounters like this become almost impossible.

Everything becomes transactional.

We ask:

“Does this relationship serve me?”

“Are they aligned with my values?”

“Do they increase or decrease my peace?”

These aren’t bad questions on their own. But taken together, they reduce people to utilities—objects placed on the chessboard of life.

Friendships become networking.

Love becomes co-branding and “high-value individuals.”

Even grief becomes something to overcome on a timeline of productivity.

This cultural logic tells us to cut out anything—or anyone—that doesn’t serve our goals. And sometimes, that’s necessary. But when everything is seen through that lens, we lose the ability to relate without benchmarking. Without measuring. Without calculating value in real time.

We’re never just present with someone—we’re managing the relationship.

Tracking outcomes.

Monitoring ROI.

We’ve mistaken control for connection.

Performance for progress.

Optimisation for intimacy.

But maybe we could trade that for a moment of refusal.

A pause in the loop.

A step off the carousel.

Because a life is not a product.

It’s a story.

And stories don’t exist in isolation.

They cross, collide, and reshape one another—if we let them.