The Most Beautiful Sense of Time

The universe is around 13.8 billion years old, largely empty, rather cold and, for the most part, dimly lit. It couldn’t care less whether we have a lovely weekend. This makes it all the more remarkable that it has produced a being who can look forward to Friday evening, lose sleep over a trip and grin at a green traffic light.

Anticipation is a strange form of magic: something isn’t even there yet, and yet it already has an effect. Yet the present is regarded as the only legitimate tense in life. This is where we’re meant to be – in the moment, mindful and composed. And no sooner have we arrived than we’re thinking of Friday. Or of Italy. Or of that one Saturday morning in October for which the weather forecast has looked surprisingly favourable for days.

In German, there’s an old proverb that makes quite a bold claim: ‘Anticipation is the greatest joy.’ This time, there’s a surprising amount of truth in it. For anticipation is not an escape from the present; it is its extension. It takes something from the future and places a little of it in the here and now. A loan granted by the future, interest-free. Nothing has happened yet, and yet something is already there. A direction.

When it comes to cars, this is a wonderful exception. Nobody is seriously looking forward to a 4.78-metre car. You buy an object and look forward to experiences: to the early morning, to the mountain pass, to someone in the passenger seat, to the petrol station just before the Italian border, where the coffee is objectively mediocre and yet tastes exactly right. An object with a built-in future. 

It all starts with a wish, and wishes are marvellous because they remain open-ended. They say: ‘It could be.’ A wish needs no plan, no booking number, no spreadsheet; it’s allowed to be a little unreasonable. Expectations are more difficult. Expectations are wishes with an interior designer. An expectation steps into the future ahead of us, furnishes the house, orders the weather, chooses the music and dictates how we are to feel about it all. Sunset at 7.32 pm, accompanied by white wine, a light breeze, no mosquitoes – please, exactly like that. Life is familiar with such briefings. It just doesn’t stick to them. That is why expectations are so often disappointed and wishes so rarely fulfilled. A wish opens things up; an expectation fixes them in place. The best part of anticipation is when it remains a mere inkling. One could. What a marvellous word. The subjunctive is the grammar of anticipation.

Buying a car is therefore not the end of a desire; it transforms it. Desire becomes possibility, possibility becomes anticipation, and anticipation eventually becomes action. Door shut. Off we go. And that is why, to this day, the car remains one of the most wonderful objects of anticipation: because it turns the subjunctive into a real possibility. The key is there; the road begins just beyond the exit – right, left, straight ahead. According to Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, even choosing a direction is one of the fundamental human needs, and that is precisely what the car sells in abundance: the promise that an ordinary day can still turn into something worth talking about in the evening.

But why do people want a particular car, often long before they can explain why? Rarely because they need it. Most often, because it says something about them. A younger generation calls this ‘just for the plot’: you don’t do something because it would be sensible; you do it for the story. The product becomes a prop in your own narrative. Nietzsche, turned on its head: whoever buys a ‘why’ will put up with almost any price. That is the difference between an object and a counterpart. And with the counterpart, to quote the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, one is dealing with resonance. It arises where something responds, not where something merely functions.

Between desire and experience lies the journey. Navigation knows when we’ll arrive. The journey knows why we’re travelling. Often we set off precisely because not everything is set in stone, because the detour, the wrong turn or the friend with the supposedly foolproof shortcut make the story all the better. Years later, nobody speaks enthusiastically about a journey where the estimated time of arrival was spot on to the minute. Life loves a plot.

To capture a large part of this promise, BMW long ago coined three words that have since come to mean far more than mere advertising: ‘The Joy of Driving’. Since 1965, initially as ‘Aus Freude am Fahren’ (‘For the Joy of Driving’); in 1972, the ‘Aus’ was dropped. The phrase is so well known that it’s easy to overlook just how apt it is. It doesn’t mention performance, progress or efficiency – nor any of the lofty terms companies like to use to prove they’ve read their strategy documents. It mentions joy. For six decades. For a car brand, ‘joy’ is a wonderfully non-technical promise. It cannot be measured in newton-metres; no test bench can confirm it. You either feel it or you don’t.

The interesting thing about it is the build-up over time. Long before the joy of driving takes hold, a film has already begun playing in your head. Anticipation of the drive. It begins with the first glance, with the configuration, with the colour that sensible adults spend three evenings discussing as if the future of Europe depended on it, with that unnecessary trip to the garage in the evening, just to check once more whether it’s really there. It’s there. Joy has a lead-up. Smart brands have realised this. They don’t sell products. They sell the film programme playing in your head. The programme celebrates organised anticipation.

And it has an afterglow, too. After the journey, what remains is a song, a smell, a road, an evening, a completely wrong turn. The experience becomes a story, and stories have the pleasant quality of bringing the past back to life whilst simultaneously creating a new future. At some point, someone says: ‘We should do that again.’ That’s all it takes. And the whole marvellous nonsense begins all over again. This is how joy travels through time: as a wish, as anticipation, as an experience, later as a memory, and at some point again as a new wish. It does not necessarily burn itself out the moment it arrives. It can shine ahead and continue to glow afterwards. Sometimes it even does both at once. In the end, a good life consists less of as many highlights as possible than of well-spaced reasons to look forward to something. Big things are welcome, but the little ones work with astonishing reliability. The art lies in infusing the time in between with meaning.

Fred has probably never read either Kent Berridge or Hartmut Rosa, and is unlikely to have much of a grasp of self-determination theory either. Nevertheless, he knows what it’s all about.

He’s delighted and sets off.