Five Days, Not Five Years

Anchored to: Heidegger’s three temporal dimensions and what happens to them under crisis

Heidegger wasn’t writing about money. Being and Time is about the structure of human existence. I’m borrowing his structure on purpose, so let me say what I’m taking and what I’m adding.

He argued that time isn’t a container we move through. It’s the shape of how things matter to us, and it has three dimensions that work together. Having-been is the past as it shapes what’s possible now. Making-present is our engagement with what’s in front of us. Being-ahead-of-oneself is our reach toward what could come (Heidegger, 1927/2010).

In planning time, those three hold together. Past experience informs present strategy, which points toward a goal that feels reachable.

In crisis time, the integration comes apart. The past is often traumatic and can’t be trusted as a guide. The present is overwhelming. The future is unpredictable enough that planning for it can feel meaningless, not just hard.

That last move is mine, not Heidegger’s, and I hold it as my interpretation. But it fits what I see. The resident I told you about at the start of this series, who scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on a numeracy test while living in her car, had a planning horizon of days, not years. Nothing about her math was broken.

Why does this matter for teaching? A curriculum that assumes an integrated sense of time keeps asking people to connect past, present, and future in a way their circumstances have pulled apart. The kinder reading of a missed goal is that the goal belonged to a horizon the person doesn’t currently have. The work is to help that horizon grow, one realistic step at a time, instead of asking someone to act as though it’s already there.

I walk through all three dimensions in this week’s episode. If you asked the people you work with how far ahead they can really plan, what would they say?