Living, or preparing to live
On the axis: Temporal orientation · the time of a life
We keep deferring living to a future that, often, never comes: life flows away while we prepare it. Yet if we project nothing, if we give up every goal, do we not lose what gives existence a direction and an impetus?
Justification
The common lament over the shortness of life rests, according to , on an accounting error: we have not been given little time, we waste a great deal of it. The argument shifts the problem from fate to use: the preoccupied, slaves to a thousand engagements, have never lived, for they keep deferring their life to later. Only the present is properly ours, the past being fixed and the future uncertain; to claim one's time as one defends a possession is to stop squandering it and to begin, at last, to live.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.On the Shortness of Life, I
On the Shortness of Life, I-III and XIV (we squander time) · Letters to Lucilius, I (claim your own time for yourself)
Justification
The for-itself is stretched toward the future: it defines itself by the project, that toward which it throws itself forward, and is never fixed in its past, which it must always take up and re-signify. To live is to pro-ject oneself; the present itself has meaning only in relation to what one makes oneself be. The orientation is therefore resolutely that of the project, not of memory nor of the bare instant.
Being and Nothingness, Part 2, ch. 2 (temporality, the ecstasis of the future)
Anchors: Seneca · Pascal · Sartre
leads to: Attention and diversion