We celebrate people who are able to live in the now. Wow. So present. But then we design our society so that we continually put ourselves at the whims of a past version of ourselves with imperfect information. If you want to go camping near the bay area, you have to book a camp site many months in advance. By the time that weekend rolls around, you better be excited about going camping! It doesn't matter that you're sick and a freak blizzard is coming through. Sure, the site only cost $34, but you already invested months of waiting. This is a scarce resource! Our society reward anxious type-a planners with access to the best stuff. Sometimes the goods even compound -- If you want to buy a plane ticket, you're going to need to stay somewhere, and so the best accommodation is also going to get booked out. At the same time, if you travel with an itinerary and a checklist of things to do... you're missing... everything. We don't travel to see things, but to live and to [[Following the heat|follow the heat]] in novel cultures and currents. We're training ourselves to be anxious and to live in the future. The planner part is constantly trying to estimate what might happen and how we should be, while the be-er part lives on rails, losing sight of beauty, constrained by our own models of what we thought the world would be like, unable to partake in serendipity and a meaningful life. Imagine if we designed systems that honored our current selves. We could actively combat planners with systems powered by chance, or need, or genuine interest. Another way to fight time tyranny is with abundance and convenience. That's an underappreciated reason why people love Uber and Amazon -- it's the freedom to stay out late without a plan, and the shopping list you never had to write (let alone the trip to the mall). Planning in general is just deferred violence onto yourself. Systems of commitment to do things by or on certain dates are systems of harm. You should instead commit to people and ideas and nurture them both. Find a way to live your life so that you're doing what you want to be doing, and then do it - living every moment with autonomy and agency to do whatever you want. "Without plans you can't achieve great things" the planning addicts warble. But they are missing that everything is already run by compound interest. We invest each moment into something, and the best way to improve the yield of that investment is to have it be durably aligned with our true desires. Wealth is freedom from time tyranny.