The Sinking Stilts: On the Futility of Chasing a Perfectly Current Now

There is a seductive, almost moralistic piece of advice that floats around content strategy circles: that our pages should live in the present tense. It sounds so proactive, so responsible. We are told to scour our sites for temporal markers—"last year," "in recent months," "currently"—and to scour them out. The goal is a state of perpetual currency, a body of work that speaks from a perfectly calibrated *now*, unmoored from the embarrassing specificity of a date that has passed. I think this pursuit is not just exhausting, but fundamentally misguided. It mistakes timeliness for timelessness, and in doing so, it erases the very texture of thought.

The problem with trying to live in the present tense is that the present is a vapor. The moment you finish the update, the page begins to drift into the past. You are, in effect, building on stilts that are perpetually sinking into the mud of elapsed time. The energy required to heave everything back up to an ephemeral "now" is immense, and it is spent on a fight you cannot win. The internet is not a newspaper; its value is not defined by a single day's dispatch. It is a layered record, an accumulation. By trying to sand off all temporal edges, we create content that is frictionless and contextless, floating in a featureless void.

More crucially, this practice dishonors the reader’s intelligence. When I encounter a piece titled "The State of AI in 2023" that has been stealthily edited to read "The State of AI Today," but still contains references to models and events from that year, I feel a distinct unease. The page is trying to trick me. It has traded honesty for a superficial gloss. I would far rather read "The State of AI in 2023," understood clearly as a snapshot of that moment, with all its prescient predictions and quaint blind spots intact. That datedness is not a flaw; it is a feature. It tells me how thinking has evolved. It provides a fixed point from which to measure progress.

The received wisdom of the perpetual present tense assumes that all content must be equally and immediately useful. But some of the most useful content is that which shows its work, its history. A technical tutorial from 2018, clearly dated, can be a treasure trove of foundational principles, even if the final code block is obsolete. A dated opinion piece reveals the biases and concerns of its era. By preserving the timestamp, we allow the content to be what it actually is: a artifact of a specific moment in our understanding. We stop asking it to be a chameleon and let it be a fossil—and fossils, as any scientist will tell you, contain immense, structured information.

Our vigilance should not be spent erasing time’s passage, but in annotating it. Instead of silently changing "last year" to "this year," we might append a brief note: "This was written in 2022; the core principle holds, though tool X has since been superseded by Y." This is the work of a curator, not a janitor. It acknowledges the sinking stilts, and instead of a futile heave, it builds a small, solid pier beside them, marking the water level. It treats the page not as a broken device to be endlessly fixed, but as a living document with a biography. And in that biography, not in a manufactured present, lies its real and enduring value.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: