Five hours that felt like two — Adler's 'now, here' as I actually felt it
The night five hours felt like two
Recently, while studying for the Registered Information Security Specialist exam, I glanced at the clock.
“Wait — five hours already?”
It had felt, in my head, like maybe two. The pen on my notebook hadn’t paused, and in my head problems had been quietly building little bridges between each other. There was no room to check the time.
The body, though, doesn’t lie. The moment I stood up — heavy fatigue, sharp hunger, immediate sleepiness. Five hours’ worth of physical signals arrived all at once.
In that moment, something occurred to me: “Maybe — I was just now actually living ‘now, here.’”
This is the closing essay in my three-part series on The Courage to Be Disliked (continuing from Part 1 on teleology and Part 2 on the separation of tasks). The climax of the book is the practice of living “now, here” seriously, and today I want to write about it through my own experience.
The book’s climax — life as a dance
The most quoted line from the final night (Night V) of the book:
Life is not a line. It is a series of points. What matters is to live this moment seriously, as if dancing.
This is not saying “don’t think about the future.” What the book is pushing back on is the trade where you sacrifice the present for the future — the posture of “once X happens, I’ll start for real.”
The way five hours melted into a felt two — that was, almost exactly, living a point seriously. I wasn’t picturing the exam result. I wasn’t comparing myself to past me. I was just down inside the problems. And the fatigue in my body, when I stood up, had been honestly accumulating the whole time.
My habit: thinking too far ahead, and watching the present go thin
Honest version: I have spent most of my working life not in this “now, here” state.
The reason is simple. I tend to overthink the future of my career.
There’s a Japanese saying — “three years on a rock, even a stone warms” — meaning: stay somewhere long enough and good things ripen. Since I started working, the longest I’ve stayed at one company is about two and a half years.
I notice the next view. The present spot starts looking thin in comparison. Eventually I start preparing to move.
Not that I regret any of those moves — each one I made with the resolve from Part 1: “if I were going to quit halfway, I shouldn’t have started in the first place.”
But re-reading this book, I notice the older pattern: there were moments where watching the future made me hold the present too lightly.
”A three-year cycle” as a fix
What I’m now thinking about, as a corrective:
In my next role, I want a three-year cycle for taking stock of my skills, career, and feelings.
Imagining the future is fine. But I want it as a frame for stacking present points seriously, not as a tool for thinning the present. Knowing there’s a check-in point in three years means today, this one day, is not just something that passes by — it’s a single point pointed at a three-year deposit. Dance, seriously, at this moment. That, I think, is what the book is naming.
Three axes that hold the three-year cycle together
A “three-year cycle” by itself doesn’t produce anything. It only starts working once you decide what you check inside it. Looking back at what I wrote over April and May, what I was actually circling — without quite naming it — was three axes of self-review.
| Axis | What to check | Companion article |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Inner cognition | Catching your own judgment habits as structure | The urge to decide fast is your strength’s shadow — Need for Cognitive Closure and the 2-week rule |
| 2. Outer evaluation | Borrowing other people’s eyes to see your own blind spots | When I realized my biggest gap wasn’t technical — what an outside review showed me |
| 3. Team reproducibility | Writing down how I run a team, so I can reproduce it elsewhere | Knowing psychological safety isn’t enough — the four stages |
Every three years, run all three axes in one pass. Look only at the inner axis and you slide into excessive introspection. Look only at outer evaluation and you slide back into approval-seeking. Look only at the team and your own self-check gets postponed. Only when all three line up does the three-year cycle become a foundation for living “now, here” seriously.
When I wrote those three articles separately, I thought they were independent insights. Writing today, I notice: without realizing it, they were each touching one face of the same single system.
The “thank you” that I felt as contribution
The final night also offers another sturdy prescription: contribution to others.
The feeling that “I am being useful to someone” is what makes a person happy.
Important distinction: this is not approval. Approval requires someone else’s evaluation. Contribution is complete inside your own subjective sense of it.
I felt this recently, in a moment I can actually point to.
At work, I took on rolling out AI-related tooling across the company. To be honest, I am not an AI specialist. My skills in that specific area, on day one, weren’t deep. What I had was action bias and the ability to gather information quickly.
Even so, I kept making information accessible to the team — not only about the AI itself but about the on-ramps to it (Git, GitHub, branching, etc.). Bit by bit, the team’s underlying skill floor moved up.
One day, a team member said “thank you” to me about it. Not an evaluation — a plain, direct thank-you. That moment was, very clearly to me, a frame of contribution I could feel.
In Part 2, I wrote that “evaluation is someone else’s task.” That doesn’t contradict this. Evaluation is their task. Contribution is your subjective sense. The book carefully separates the two.
Standing on three legs — self-acceptance, trust, contribution
To live “now, here” seriously, the final night of the book proposes three postures.
| Posture | What it means | Where I currently am |
|---|---|---|
| Self-acceptance | Accept what you can’t change, have the courage to change what you can | I accept my age and prior career. I choose how I spend the next 30 minutes |
| Trust in others | Not conditional “credit” but unconditional trust | I assume the team’s intent and capability before the results come in |
| Contribution to others | Not approval — a subjective sense of being useful | The “thank you” from the AI rollout |
The three together are what let you live “now, here” without anxiety. Put another way: on nights when the future and approval try to drag you off, what you need isn’t a new plan — it’s a quiet check that you are still standing on these three legs.
Closing the series — the single beam underneath the three articles
Three days of writing about The Courage to Be Disliked, my bible. The single beam that runs through all three articles:
- Don’t blame the past (Part 1) — “the only person who protects me is me”
- Don’t step into others’ tasks (Part 2) — evaluation is their task; concentrate on yours
- Stack “now, here” as a point (this article) — don’t get dragged off by future or approval; stand on self-acceptance / trust / contribution
These look like three separate stories. They aren’t. Underneath them is one move: take the steering wheel of your own life back into your own hands.
One last sentence for myself, before closing:
Put as many “five-hour-felt-like-two” nights into life as you can. A future map only takes a few minutes to draw. The thing worth spending real time on is how today’s single point is used.
— Tomorrow I’ll be back here. Another point.
Summary
- A night when five hours feels like two is a moment lived “now, here” seriously
- What the book opposes is the trade where you sacrifice the present for the future
- Overthinking the future and thinning the present can be corrected with a three-year cycle of taking stock
- Contribution isn’t approval — it’s complete in your subjective sense. A simple “thank you” can land as that
- The beam running through all three articles is taking the steering wheel of your life back into your own hands
Related Articles
- “Only I protect me” — how The Courage to Be Disliked handed me back the steering wheel — Part 1: teleology and resolve
- The day I stopped trying to move other people — Adler’s separation of tasks, finally landing — Part 2: separation of tasks, at home and at work
- When I realized my biggest gap wasn’t technical — what an outside review showed me — Stacking points where you can, “now, here”