Nothing has actually changed in the last two weeks. Same work, same open loops, same things I keep meaning to get to. The only real difference is there’s more to distract me now, because the World Cup is on.
And I’ve been watching what it does to people. To me first, if I’m honest. There’s this thing sports do… they pull you all the way into the now. The match is on and for ninety minutes there is no tomorrow. No inbox. No the-thing-I-said-I’d-finish. Just this, mattering more than it has any right to.
Then I look around and it’s not only me. My friends do it too. The one who’s been drowning in a project all month… for a day, he’s fine. The one carrying something heavy at home… for a few hours, it’s set down. Everyone’s tomorrow goes quiet at the same time. Problems paused. Plans paused. A whole group of people standing in the same present, yelling at the same screen.
And then the whistle blows. And the second it does, the market reopens.
Because that’s what we go back to. A market. So much of my life gets spent adding value to things that haven’t happened yet. It runs on speculation, like the stock market. A number moves based on what people believe about a future that isn’t here, and the value feels completely real. People win and lose on it. But that money is not in your pocket. It never was. It’s the potential of a thing, and somewhere the potential took over the actual thing you were holding today.
Worry is the same trade. I spend today’s attention buying shares in a tomorrow that hasn’t arrived and probably won’t come the way I’m pricing it. The match is the same trade, smaller. I hand huge value to an outcome that, the moment it lands, I don’t even keep.
All three feel like currency. None of them are actually mine.
The only thing actually in my pocket is today. And I don’t mean that in a soft, live-in-the-moment way. I mean it almost literally. Today’s money is real money. Time. Effort. Mindset. That’s the account I get to spend from. And when I’m honest about where it goes, it isn’t pretty. I invest way more in imagining the bad futures than the good ones. If it were a portfolio, the allocation is almost all fear. The ROI on that is dark. Unhealthy. I wrote a line in my notebook this week I can’t shake, which was basically… I should at least make them even. Not even optimistic. Just balanced.
But I’m starting to think even that was the wrong prayer.
There’s a moment in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters where a senior demon is coaching a younger one on how to quietly wreck a person, and almost the whole plan comes down to one move. Keep them living in the future. Because that’s where fear and greed and ambition live, in the part of time that’s unreal and unknown, the part you can paint anything onto. What terrifies the demon is the person coming to rest in the present. Because the present, Lewis writes, is “the point at which time touches eternity.” That’s where the real stuff actually happens.
And it’s not that tomorrow is an illusion. Jesus isn’t a “today only” guy. He says, plainly, don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow exists. He just doesn’t want me moving in. He tells this story about a man whose harvest comes in so big he tears down his barns to build bigger ones, piles it all up, and finally says the thing we’re all trying to earn… you’re set, relax, you’re safe for years. And that night he dies. The barns still full in the morning. A portfolio of futures, closed overnight. The stock market, two thousand years early.
It’s the same thing underneath the line everybody prays without thinking. Give us today our daily bread. That’s the manna, the bread that showed up on the ground every morning and rotted if you tried to hoard it, maggots by the next day. The way I’ve heard it put, God gives Eden to the Israelites… one day at a time. You couldn’t stockpile it. It was built to be daily.
And here’s where it actually turns for me. Because all of that can quietly collapse into just… be here now. Only today is real. And that’s not the Christian thing at all. That’s closer to Stoicism, or something off a meditation app. The strange claim at the center of the resurrection isn’t that the future is nothing. It’s that God’s future already broke in. Easter, in Wright’s words, was Hope “coming forward from the future into the present.” The tomorrow God promised isn’t a rumor I’m supposed to stop thinking about. It already started. It already has a foothold here.
Which means the problem was never future versus present. It’s which future I’m banking on. There’s a tomorrow that gets called overnight… the barns, the stock price, the disaster scenarios I keep buying. And there’s a tomorrow that’s already been paid for, guaranteed by something that walked out of a grave, where whatever I spend today actually holds. The work. The love. Reading the story to my kid. Doing the job well. None of it evaporates. It’s the one account where today’s money doesn’t vanish by morning.
So “make them even” was the wrong prayer. I don’t need to balance my good futures against my bad ones. I need to move the money. Out of the tomorrow I don’t own, into the one that’s already been paid for.