Mind the gap

Think about how you experience time when you're really wanting something. Maybe it's waiting for exam results, or anticipating a first date, or looking forward to a holiday. There's this strange quality where the present moment feels almost unreal compared to the imagined future. You're physically here, but psychologically you're already there - in that future moment when you'll finally have what you want.

Unlike a rock or a tree, which simply are what they are, human beings are always becoming something other than what they currently are. We exist in a constant state of incompleteness, always defining ourselves through our projects and possibilities rather than our current reality.

This is something the existential Casanova and ****french philosopher, John-Paul Sartre was fascinated by. He noticed that human consciousness has this peculiar ability to "nihilate" - to negate or transcend the present moment by projecting itself into possible futures.

This sounds quite liberating at first - and in many ways it is. It's what allows us to imagine better futures, to work toward goals, to transform ourselves and our circumstances. But Sartre realised there's a trap hidden in this very capacity. Because we're always defining ourselves through what we might become rather than what we are right now, we can never actually arrive at a state of completion or final satisfaction.

Consider the person who thinks, "Once I get promoted to manager, then I'll feel successful." But what happens when they get that promotion? They don't suddenly feel complete. Instead, they start thinking about senior manager, or director, or starting their own company. The goal posts keep moving because the structure of consciousness itself is always pointing beyond the present moment toward new possibilities.

This is what Sartre meant when he wrote about the "gap" between our current reality and our imagined future self. There's always going to be this space between who we are and who we think we should be, between what we have and what we want. And here's the crucial insight: this gap can never be permanently closed, because the moment we achieve one goal, consciousness immediately generates new projects and possibilities.

Sartre described this beautifully in a passage about experiencing time: "I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation?... I don't know where I am any more: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little... This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it's been there for a long time."

That queasy feeling he describes - the sense of being simultaneously ahead of ourselves and behind ourselves, never quite present - is what happens when we live primarily through our projects rather than in our immediate experience. We become temporal refugees, homeless in time, always psychologically elsewhere.

But Sartre's most troubling insight was about what he called "bad faith" - the ways we try to escape the anxiety of this perpetual incompleteness by pretending we're something we're not. Bad faith isn't about lying to others; it's about deceiving ourselves in very specific ways.

One form of bad faith is when we identify completely with our roles or future goals, pretending that these abstract identities are who we "really" are. The person who says "I am a doctor" rather than "I work as a doctor" is trying to stabilise their identity by identifying with their profession. The person who lives entirely for their next achievement is trying to escape the uncertainty of the present by locating their "real" self in an imagined future.

Another form of bad faith is what Sartre called "being-for-others" - defining ourselves entirely through how we imagine others see us. This is the person who's constantly performing their identity, always thinking about their image or reputation rather than engaging authentically with their actual experience. They've outsourced their sense of self to an imagined audience.

Both forms of bad faith are attempts to escape what Sartre saw as the fundamental "anguish" of human existence - the recognition that we are radically free and therefore radically responsible for creating meaning in our lives. It's much easier to think "I am pursuing this goal because that's who I am" than to acknowledge "I am choosing to pursue this goal, and I could choose differently at any moment."

The person obsessed with getting an amplifier that goes to 12 might be engaging in bad faith by identifying completely with being "someone who has the best equipment." They've tried to stabilise their identity around this image of themselves as a person who always has the latest and greatest. But this identification is ultimately fragile, because it depends on external validation and endless acquisition.

What makes this particularly tragic is that bad faith often masquerades as authenticity. The person who says "I'm just being true to myself by always striving for more" might actually be fleeing from the more difficult recognition that their "self" is not a fixed thing to be true to, but an ongoing project of creation that could go in many different directions.

Sartre wasn't suggesting we should stop having goals or working toward things we want. But he was pointing to something crucial about how we relate to those goals. When we treat our projects as expressions of who we "really" are rather than as choices we're making right now, we risk falling into bad faith. When we defer our sense of okayness to some future achievement, we miss the reality that consciousness itself is always going to generate new projects and new dissatisfactions.

The alternative isn't to become passive or stop wanting things. It's to recognise what Sartre called "radical freedom" - the recognition that we are always choosing, always creating ourselves through our actions and responses, always responsible for the meaning we make of our circumstances. This includes being responsible for how we relate to our own wanting.

You can want the amplifier that goes to 12 while recognising that this wanting is a choice you're making, not an inevitable expression of who you are. You can work toward goals while acknowledging that these goals are projects you've chosen to take on, not fundamental requirements for your existence. You can pursue achievements while remaining present to the person who's doing the pursuing, rather than deferring your entire sense of self to some imagined future completion.

This kind of authentic relationship to our own projects and desires is difficult because it requires us to hold two seemingly contradictory truths simultaneously: that our goals and dreams matter enough to work toward, and that our fundamental okayness can't depend on achieving them. It means living fully in the tension between caring deeply about outcomes while not being attached to them in ways that alienate us from present experience.

The future we're always reaching toward will never arrive in the way we imagine it. But the person doing the reaching is always here, always choosing, always free to wake up to the reality of this moment rather than the fantasy of the next one.