N° 012Planted 2026

Note · in bloom

The Now and the Not Now

Via Robin Sloan’s April 2025 newsletter, Alan Jacobs on temporal bandwidth in No Time But The Present quotes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.

It's also where this note gets its name. Jacobs on what happens when the Now is all there is:

You can’t stop playing the game, but its rules keep changing. There’s no time to think about anything other than the Now, and the not-Now increasingly takes on the character of an unwelcome and, in its otherness, even befouling imposition.

Alan goes on to say,

Increasing our temporal bandwidth helps us address the condition of frenetic standstill by slowing us down and at the same time giving us more freedom of movement. It is a balm for agitated souls.

I’m reminded of Colin Fleming on Melville’s Bartleby for The American Interest (via Venkatesh Rao)

"ghosting himself with his own life."

Rao's own read on where that leaves us:

The Arrow of Freedom™ now points in the other direction. Escape now lies inwards.

This line from Nettle by Ethel Cain:

Time passes slower in the flicker of the hospital light

particularly resonates as my father was in the hospital in June 2025 with a heart condition, when anxiety extended and expanded my sense of the now, blocking out the ability to see beyond the present moment and plan for the future.

Back to Jacobs:

Navigating life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. There are days we can’t even put gas in our cars without being assaulted by advertisements blared at ear-rattling volume. And so we learn to be ruthless in deciding how to deploy our attention. We only have so much of it, and often the decision of whether or not to “pay” it must be made in an instant. To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals for our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity.

His remedy is to "break bread with the dead":

I want to argue that one of the best actions we can take when faced with this paradoxical misery is to listen to the voices of those from long ago and far away—to “break bread with the dead.” And while I do not wish to suggest here that reading old books is a cure for depression, the expansion of our temporal bandwidth, to which reading old books can make a vital contribution, just might be a hedge against depressive inclinations and might provide a port, for however brief a time, in the storm.

That jibes with Clive Thompson’s Rewilding your attention.

Temporal bandwidth works at the scale of a whole career, too. Will Larson in A forty-year career:

There is, however, a simple formula for checking if what you’re doing is sustainable: how long does it take on a vacation or weekend until you stop feeling anxious, and how anxious do you start feeling when you think about returning to work on Monday? If work anxiety is a constant companion, then change your situation even if it feels like a step back in the short-term: your success depends on sustained impact, not spikes.

Work anxiety that follows you into the weekend is the narrow Now in another form: it crowds out everything that isn't Monday.

What's been widening my temporal bandwidth is Readwise Reader and structured notes. Reader is where long reads wait until I have attention to give them, instead of getting constantly triaged in the moment. Highlighting means the good parts don't disappear. Most of the quotes on this page came out of Reader (tagged now or re-wilding). And this garden is the structured notes part. Going back through old highlights and putting them next to each other is my own way of breaking bread with the dead, even if the dead in question is me from a few years ago.

Questions

  • What tools have you been using to re-wild your attention and increase your temporal bandwidth?
  • How have they been helping?

Paths from here