The product is the excrement of the act

_“Sometimes,” Julia said, “I feel the past and the future pulling on me so strongly that there is no room left for the present.”_

Honest! When was the last time you spent an entire day just enjoying what you just did and felt? Enjoyment for its own sake without thinking about the future or worrying about the consequences far in the future?

When was the last time you lived like this for a whole month?

Do you have a hard time forgetting your responsibilities, your goals, your productivity, and just being in the here and now?

Nowadays our lives revolve around _things_. We determine our worth as an expression of our material possessions: as an expression of our control over things external to ourselves. We judge our success in life in terms of our “productivity,” that is, our ability to produce these things. Our social system revolves more than anything else around the production and consumption of goods. Even if we don't think about material objects, we present our lives to each other as a thing: we express our congratulations, our future prospects, our social status... everything but how we _feel_ right now. The result justifies the means, we say. That is, the _product_ of our actions, the end result of our lives, is more important to us than the course of life itself.

But products are the _excrement_ of actions. The product is what remains when the dust falls and the pulse returns to normal when the day is over and the coffin is lowered into the ground. We do not exist in fallen dust or in a list of values; we are here in the present, in the process of acting, creating and feeling. Just as we try to make ourselves immortal by fleeing into the world of rigid, immortal images, in the same way we flee from ourselves when we prefer to think about the result of our actions rather than the experience of those actions themselves. Ultimately, it's quite complicated to actually ask yourself the question of whether you really feel good right now and what kind of feelings you actually have at the moment. It's much easier to focus on the results, the stressful signs of your life. It seems like these things are easier to understand and easier to control.

Of course, the average worker today is used to thinking about the result rather than the means. Most of the time and energy is spent on a job that most likely does not fulfill one's dreams. Every month we wait for payday, because the meaning of life is calculated from the payslip: without it, people would feel as if they were wasting their lives. If he didn't see the "consequences" of his actions as a justification for them, then life would be unbearable - what if a person constantly thought about what he was feeling while packing goods, or if he asked himself every time he fought with the failing fax machine whether he was having fun? Precisely because everyday experiences in life are so predictable and meaningless, people tend to focus on the coming weekend, the next vacation, the next purchase, just so they don't go crazy. And eventually they are forced to extend this mindset to other parts of their lives: people begin to judge possible actions based on what kind of benefit they will bring, just as people decide to take a job when the pay is right.

That is why the present has lost almost all meaning for modern people. Instead, life is spent constantly planning the future: people would rather study for a degree than for the joy of learning; When deciding to take a job, the need for social status, wealth and “security” outweighs the enjoyment of it; People would rather save money for big purchases and vacations than buy their way out of wage slavery in order to enjoy full-time freedom. When he experiences deep satisfaction with another person, he tries to freeze that moment in order to make it permanent (a contract) by getting married. On Sundays he goes to church where he is told that good deeds have to be done in order to experience eternal salvation, instead of simply doing them out of a willingness to help (as Nietzsche says: The good Christian still wants to be well paid). The “aristocratic disregard for consequences,” the ability to act for the sake of acting, is far from him.

_Modern society focuses on the production and distribution of material goods rather than the happiness and satisfaction of its participants. Therefore, modern man thinks about his life in terms of what he has to show rather than thinking about life itself._

It's a cliché that middle-class and middle-aged men and women would struggle to put aside their insurance policies and investment programs to savor the moment. Because we often don't do it differently and exchange the present for the future and the experiences for the souvenirs. We keep memorabilia, trophies, boxes of keepsakes, old letters, as if life could be collected and organized for later...for later? When? Life takes place in the here and now, it flows through us like a river; and like a river, it cannot be stopped without losing its magic. The more time we spend “storing” it, the less we have to throw ourselves into it.

The worst of us are actually the radicals and artists. All too often, we “revolutionaries” spend our efforts talking and thinking about a revolution that “will come at some point,” rather than focusing on _making_ the revolution in the present. We are so used to thinking in terms of production that even when we try to make life instantaneous and exciting, we end up focusing our energy on an event in the future - one that we may not even experience ourselves. And like the managers in the factories, we are more concerned about productivity (the number of new creditors recruited, the progress of the “cause”, etc.) than about how we and our fellow human beings are feeling and living right now.

Artists suffer the most from this tendency; because their talent itself depends on making products from the raw material of real life. There is something of the capitalist's greed for dominance in the way artists express their emotions and experiences into their own form. Because the expression of feelings and sensations, no matter how unique and inscrutable it may be, ultimately always consists of a simplification. For the artist it is not enough to simply experience and enjoy life as it is. They end up exploiting their lives for their _careers_, for a series of products outside of themselves, so that even their lives end up orienting themselves around their careers. It may happen that they can no longer imagine making love on a rooftop at daybreak without planning the _perfect scene for the new novel_ (excrement!) in which exactly that happens.

Certainly, excretion serves a healthy and necessary function for the soul as well as the body, and there is a place for art in our lives as a way of pouring emotion into the world while the heart is filled to overflowing; but if you insist on doing it even though it's unnecessary, you end up just forcing your heart and the rest of your insides to do it. We must put life and experiences first, only with this intention must we face the world, as fresh and innocent as if we were children, without intentions to consume, categorize, organize or simplify the vast limitlessness of our experiences. Otherwise, in our search for things that can be flattened and preserved “for all time,” we will miss what is most essential, most beautiful, and most immediate in the world. _Imagination should be used first and foremost to transform our everyday reality, not to represent it merely symbolically._ How many exciting novels can be written about the kind of life most of us currently lead? _Let us live our art instead of just striving to create art from our lives._

Let’s stop “making history” – we’re all so obsessed with winning awards – and start living with it. _That_ would be a _real_ revolution!

_"But I tell you, Henri, every moment you steal from the present is a moment lost forever. There is only the now."_

If we are ever going to find happiness, it will be in the process of living, doing what we actually want and living our dreams, not in the products of our lives. If we don't stop and enjoy the present now, when will we?

by Jeannette Winterson, published inDays of War