The Past, Present, and Death: Three Things That Are Always True

I hear a lot of people say that death is the only truth of the universe. It sounds deep. It gets nods. But I think it is incomplete. The past is also a truth. It happened, it cannot be edited, it is locked. And the present is a truth. You are here, reading this, in a body, right now. That is real.

The only thing that is not a truth is the future. Or more precisely, our thoughts about the future. We treat our predictions like facts. They are not. They are stories we tell ourselves about a thing that has not happened and may never happen the way we imagine.

Why a developer is thinking about this

Because I do it constantly in code, and so do you. We obsess over the future. We architect for a scale we do not have. We add abstraction layers for requirements that never arrive. We pick a message queue because what if we need to handle a million events a day, when we are currently handling forty.

The future is the one place where you are allowed to be infinitely wrong and still feel productive.

I have done this. I once spent two weeks building a plugin system for a SaaS product so that future modules could be added without touching core code. Beautiful design. We added exactly one module in the next year, and it would have been a fifteen-minute job without the plugin system. I optimized for a future that did not show up.

The present is where you ship

The past is data. You learn from it. The present is the only place you can actually act. The future is fog. And yet we spend most of our anxiety on the fog and most of our regret on the data, and almost none of our attention on the one place where we can do anything at all.

The shipped thing that exists today beats the perfect thing you are still imagining. I believe this more every year. Not because I have stopped caring about good architecture. I care a lot. But I have learned that you earn the right to refactor by first having something that works.

• The past tells you what broke. Listen to it.
• The present is the only writable memory. Use it.
• The future is read-only and the file does not exist yet. Stop pretending you can read it.

The quiet version

I am not religious about this. I do not meditate on mountaintops. I live in Kathmandu, I have deadlines, my mind races at night about things that will probably never happen. But on the good days, I remember that the only move available to me is the next small one, today, with what I actually have.

Death is true. Fine. The past is true. The present is true. And the story I am telling myself about next month is just a story. Knowing that does not fix everything. But it makes the present, the one truth I can touch, feel a little less crowded.