47%

You cannot author a life you are not present for.

I cannot stop thinking about self-authorship.

I have been reading Robert Kegan and Marcia Baxter Magolda, then the papers underneath the papers, then the papers underneath those. I have gone pretty far down this rabbit hole and somewhere in there I had to stop and ask why. Why this. Why now.

And what I finally understood was this. The pull of authorship started with presence.

If there is one thing I have actually learned in the last 25 years, it is this. Being present is the hardest, and maybe the most important, thing I will ever try to do.

I didn’t learn it at 9:03. That morning taught me that time is finite. It did not teach me how to slow down. That part took decades, and I learned it the way I have learned most things that matter…pretty slowly.

I started to see it in 2016, when the boys were small and the ordinary moments suddenly came with some regret. It showed up again in 2020, when the world stopped and I found myself home for the longest stretch in close to 13 years. Week after week under one roof with the people I loved most. And I never went back.

And what I figured out in that unique window of time was somewhat unexpected. Being home is not the same as being present. I had been confusing the two for years.

For years, I thought this was about geography. Before the boys, I flew out Monday morning and came home Thursday night, every week, and told myself that pace was temporary. When they came along, the travel slowed, a night here or there every couple of weeks, and I figured that was the fix.

Sure, it helped, but cutting the travel was not the instant game changer. Because even when I was home — in the room, physically present — there were times I still wasn’t there. I was checking email, or thinking about tomorrow’s meeting, or worried about what we were all experiencing. I was spending the 89% of life that has nothing to do with work as if it were work.

But I kept thinking about those moments. And that regret.

What do I mean? It was easy before they came around. If I wasn’t present for something, I could kind of redo it. A bad race. Go do it again. A dinner where I wasn’t really there with Alison. That’s okay, let’s go out tomorrow. On and on. But when the kids came, it got much harder. How do you ask a one-year-old to laugh again, to crawl, to smile up at you? How do you ask a three-year-old to fall asleep on your chest one more time, and have it feel like a moment? How do you spend a summer with family, then get on a plane and start doing the math on everything you are about to miss?

It has taken getting older to really understand this. The moments you can redo were never the ones that counted. It is the ones you cannot that turn out to be everything.

With most things, we feel it before we can explain it. We know it in our gut long before we can say why. But curiosity is my thing, and it always pulls me toward the why. This time it pulled me to two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, and to research that made all of this stop feeling like a personal failing and start feeling like being human.

In 2010, they built an app that pinged thousands of people at random moments and asked three simple things. What are you doing. Is your mind on it. How do you feel. A quarter of a million answers later, from around 2,250 people, they had their finding.

Our minds are somewhere other than what we are doing about 47 percent of the time.

Nearly half of waking life, gone. Not to emergencies. Just drifting to the past, the future, and things that may never happen. And they found that how often your mind leaves the present predicts your happiness better than whatever you are actually doing. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Even drifting toward pleasant thoughts left people no happier than staying with the moment in front of them. And the wandering came first, the unhappiness after. The cause, not the symptom.

So we are already gone for half of it. And then we built a device whose entire business model seems to be the other half.

I wrote not long ago about the small thing we all do now, like placing the phone face down on the table. The gesture that says, I’m listening. I have done it a thousand times. It turns out the gesture is meaningless, and there is research to prove it.

A team at the University of Texas at Austin found that the mere presence of your own phone — powered off, face down, untouched — measurably lowers your available brainpower. People actually thought most clearly with it in another room, and it happened even when they never picked it up. The simple work of not reaching for it burns the same fuel you need for everything else. They called it brain drain. And it not only costs us focus, it costs the relationship right in front of you: researchers at Baylor found that phone-snubbing the person you are with, what they named phubbing, tracks with more conflict, less closeness, even depression.

Face down was never enough. But the phone was never really the point. It is just the easiest place to catch yourself leaving.

I recognized myself in those studies. Home, in the yard with the boys, there but not really there.

Which is where it all circled back to presence.

Two researchers, Kirk Warren Brown and Richard Ryan, wrote a paper with a title that could be the whole point. “The Benefits of Being Present.” Across a series of studies they found that people with more present-moment awareness were more self-aware and, most important, acted more autonomously. Not selfishly. Authentically. They behaved in line with their own values instead of running on autopilot or somebody else’s script.

Read that next to everything else, and the sentence finishes itself.

Self-authorship rests on one thing above all. Trusting your own internal voice. But your internal voice only ever speaks in the present tense. It does not text you later. It does not leave a voicemail. Or a little Post-it note. It only speaks now. And if you are mentally gone half the time, and the rest is being drained by a rectangle in your pocket, you will never hear it.

You cannot author a life you are not present for.

There is a quote that I believe explains so much. It is usually attributed to Viktor Frankl, though even that is debated.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I have come to believe that space, the gap between what happens to you and what you do about it, is just another word for presence.

And so many things are built to fill it. The phone. The worry. The anxiety. The expectations. They slide into the space before you can, answering the moment for you, so you never actually get to choose.

I know what that looks like in my own house. Beckett halfway through a story about some wrestling match, and a buzz on my wrist drops my eyes for half a second. Half a second. But the space had already closed. I had chosen the screen before I knew there was a choice to make.

The wandering mind does the same thing from the inside. Either way, the space closes before you ever get to stand in it. And that space was the whole point. It is the one place you actually get to choose.

That is why I cannot put this down. It turns out presence and self-authorship, for me, were never two separate interests. They are the same one. You become the author of your life in the only place a life is ever actually written: the present tense.

This isn’t about tossing a phone into the river or opting out. Pretty tough to do these days.

But I do have an ask. And it starts with noticing where you are right now. Not where you were. Not where you are headed. Here and now.

Because here is the only place any of it is happening. The dinner. The drive. The kid in the back seat telling you a story you are only half hearing. The friend sharing something vulnerable. The 89% of your life that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with being alive.

The seconds are moving either way. The question, the one underneath all the others I keep asking, is whether you are here for them.

We talk about so many ways to make our lives better. The next goal, the next habit, the next version of ourselves. I have chased many and most of them. But after 25 years, this is the one I would put above the rest. Being here. Actually here. And if you want to take the leap, to start writing your own story instead of the one you were handed, I do not think it begins with a plan. It begins here. In the moment you are standing in right now.

The research says we miss almost half of them. I am just trying to miss a little less.