THE PARADIGM SHIFT

Audi let us live in the future with their all-electric SUV, the e-tron. But did it also make us live in the past with its performance?

LATELY, I HAVE BEEN WANTING TO LIVE FOR MORE than 24 hours a day. Why? You see I used to live on the other side of psychology, id est, I used to mentally travel to this fancy-future-that-must-be-better-than-now. The ‘if I can just get to the weekend’ during a particularly boring week or ‘if I can just make it to the three-day weekend next month’ during a tedious month had taken the place of a fundamental thought. It worked on such a micro and macro level, that I shifted my focus from the monotony of the mundane to something larger than life in the future that never existed. And that’s when I started playing the ‘why’ game, just to find out that in this line of thinking, I was missing the myriad benefits of the present; as simple as to stop and smell the burnt engine oil.

But does that mean you should stop living in the future? No! I am not proposing to spend less time planning, which would be misguided advice. And just when I learned to stop looking too much into the future, I drove Audi’s e-tron, which let me live the future for a tick. So here’s my story of how I dealt, fought in between present and future and also, replayed the past, in a mo.