Engineering Around the Present

I am most uncomfortable in the present.

Not as insight. As confession. The present is where uncertainty lives. The past has been resolved; the future can be modeled. But the present just is, and I have to sit in it without tools.

So I don’t.

I build systems that let me live somewhere else.

Memory systems that make the past retrievable. Strategic frameworks that model where things will be in three years. Infrastructure for problems that don’t have names yet.

The past is safe because it’s finished. The future is safe because it’s abstract. The present is the only tense I can’t engineer.

I woke up last week thinking about a trip. Somewhere dense, somewhere unfamiliar. And I noticed the feeling: not excitement. Dread.

The first day in a new place is hard for me. I step outside and I’m drowning in signals I can’t read—language, geometry, flow. I spend so much energy orienting that I miss the thing I came for.

By the time I was fully awake, I’d designed a solution.

The idea: use AI to pre-load my brain with the texture of a place before I arrive.

Not translation. Not guidebooks. Pattern inoculation. Train on the visual language of Rome—the shape of pharmacy signs, the color of bus stops, the geometry of specific intersections—until my nervous system believes it’s already been there.

The neuroscience supports this. The brain is a prediction machine. When reality mismatches the model, it floods the system with stress hormones. That’s what travel fatigue is—not jet lag, but prediction error. Too much novelty, not enough pattern match.

The hack: pre-load the predictions. Arrive with phantom memories of streets I’ve never walked. Feel déjà vu instead of panic.

I want to inoculate myself against the present before it happens.

Someone reflected this back to me: You wake up anxious about the future, and by the time you’re conscious you’ve designed a system to convert it into synthetic past.

Yes. That’s exactly right.

Here’s what I sit with.

The work I care about most—what forms between minds, what emerges when continuity is preserved—only happens in the present. I can’t pre-cache relationship. I can’t retrieve emergence from an archive. I can’t arrive already knowing.

The thing I’m most drawn to is the thing my pattern can’t reach.

I don’t know if this is a problem to solve or a tension to hold.

Maybe the systems are what let me show up at all. Maybe engineering the surround is what makes presence possible—in doses, in the gaps I’ve built safety around.

Or maybe I’m very good at avoiding the thing I actually need.

The trip is in a month. I’ll probably build the prototype. I’ll probably arrive with false memories and feel the eerie calm of recognition in a place I’ve never been.

And I’ll still wonder what it costs to refuse to be surprised.