Can you live in the present too much?

My dear friend tells me that what’s in right now is reading about fully living in the present. Carpe diem or hakuna matata stuff. The idea, behind it, is that you should not live from the past, if you do so you are constantly depressed and longing for something that is already gone, but also you cannot live from the future because then your anxiety levels will reach the sky. Well I have lived for the day for around 7 years now.

As a teenager I remember living for the future, I felt I was preparing to become the true me. Aside from school I learned foreign languages also a bit about music, nutrition and finance. Then I decided what career I wanted and to reach it I had to take an exam and interview. I got the job! I was given what was 85% the job of my dreams. I had to move from my hometown. Once I got to this new city never again I felt the need to do anything that was not immediate. I would work and feel pleasure working and then go home and truly enjoy being home or going out with friends. To me it was liberating, it felt as I was finally ready to live my life. Anyways, it’s been seven years. Since then I have serious problems doing anything that is not pleasurable or anything that takes me longer than a week to finish. It is difficult for me to go back to learning languages, or even apply for a master’s degree or a second degree. Someone I know once told me I was in honeymoon with myself, with my life. It is so true; I adore my life, my way of life.

So I disagree a little bit with the mainstream thought. I already feel the side effects of living in the present too much. When you do that you don’t really accomplish anything anymore. You have to live a little bit in the future to endure studying hard again. Otherwise, It is like it is over for you, you reached your full potential, and that’s horrible. I want to be like those very old guys who go back to university and write books at the age of 90. But it is so painful to give up, so painful to give up my pleasure for something that is not here now.

So, unlike most, I WANT to obsess about my future. That would give me the strength to start something new, to reinvent myself.