The Future Self – Dr Fabola

This is a note to self, a journal of sorts. You might find it relevant too…

One of the things I love about observational comedy, other than its ability to provide comic relief on stressful days, is how relatable it can be. For instance, there's a joke by Jerry Seinfeld, where he talks about the perils of night-time procrastination. This is when you know it's getting late and you should go to bed to stand a chance to get a good night's sleep, but a part of you refrains from doing this sensible thing, and so you stay up late to enjoy one more Netflix episode or one more YouTube video or one more game of Fifa or one more TikTok post. Only, one more Netflix episode or TikTok post turns into 2 extra waking hours. Seinfeld's joke gets to the heart of the matter and articulates it better than I ever could in saying in that moment you split your identity into your current self, which he calls night guy, and your future self, which he calls morning guy. You see, night guy gets to enjoy the video bingeing or marathon gaming or endless social media scrolling sessions with impunity, but morning guy pays the price in the form of drowsiness, grogginess and a slow, awful start to the day. To quote Seinfeld, we tell ourselves in that moment that “…I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’ ‘Oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem…”

Whether you're a morning lark or night owl, I'd hazard a guess that you can relate to this joke, that there are things you do at certain moments where you know that your future self would pay the price, but you continue to do it anyway because it's not really your problem, it's your future self's problem. If you can relate to this, you're not alone, you're simply human. We can sometimes be unkind to the future self. This is a design feature (or flaw) of the human condition. One reason we're so quick to discount the feelings and disregard the needs of the future self is that, to the brain, the future self might as well be a stranger, a whole other person that's entirely different from the present self. This idea is backed up by multiple studies. For instance, Jason Mitchell, a psychologist at Harvard found in his research, that when participants were tasked with imagining themselves enjoying something pleasurable in a year’s time while their brains were being scanned with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines, many of them used the areas of the brain involved in imagining a stranger. Similarly, Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at UCLA, has also found in his research that when people think of the future self, that person is no different to a stranger on the streets, and his research suggests that people who spend a few minutes with computer simulations of what their future self might look like tend to be motivated to make better financial decisions for their retirement.

This explains why, according to other studies, when it comes to financial planning, we discount our future well-being and fail to prioritise our pension contributions for retirement in old age. This is what economists call temporal discounting. In other words, we value rewards that occur in the present more than rewards that we will receive in the future. The rationale for this future discounting is consistent with the theory that we can't be bothered to prioritise the financial well-being of the future, retired self, over the present, working self, because that future pensioner is no different than an arbitrary stranger. But when the scientists presented the study participants with aged-up versions of themselves using Virtual Reality, the participants were able to empathise more with the future self and thus allocated more money to a hypothetical retirement savings account.

This is all to say that active intervention is required to empathise with, and act in the best interests of the future self. Think about it, what chance do we have of planning for the retired version of ourselves decades from now, if we can't even do right by tomorrow morning's version of ourselves? The truth is that we just don't account for the situations that future versions of us would face. We just assume that they'll be fine because they're abstract figures in our minds, like faceless strangers we walk by on the streets.

But what can we do about this? One idea is to learn to empathise with the future self the way we would empathise with a stranger on the streets. It's no secret that we can sometimes be dismissive of strangers, not even giving them a moment’s notice in our minds. We tend to disregard their feelings and misinterpret their motives, even when they might have the best intentions for us. This is due to what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE).

The FAE is a cognitive bias that manifests when we misinterpret the motivations and actions of strangers, largely due to incomplete information. In other words, when we observe strangers in certain situations, we conclude that the way they behave is an accurate reflection of who they are, regardless of other aggravating factors that could have influenced their behaviours in those situations. But when we find ourselves exhibiting those behaviours in similar situations, we are quick to explain our motives differently, by leaning on the same aggravating factors that we fail to account for with strangers’ behaviours.

For instance, when your colleague is a few minutes late, you might be tempted to assume that tardiness is a personality trait of theirs, but when you're late, you come up with a good reason for why it happened. If said colleague shows up late, it’s more likely that you’ll assume they have time management issues, rather than pausing to wonder whether something is momentarily wrong with them or whether something unusual has happened. But when you show up late, you’re more likely to attribute your tardiness to traffic, or a broken alarm, or something else that definitely isn’t your fault. Perhaps the best example of the FAE comes from another comic genius, George Carlin, when, in reference to driving on the highway, he said “have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” Once we acknowledge that we're all a bit guilty of the FAE, we can begin to take the steps towards empathising with strangers, especially that all-important stranger that is the future self.

This is the part of the blog post where I ask and attempt to answer the question: what does this have to do with art? Well, we all have projects, ideas and plans we'd love to execute. Perhaps it's learning to paint, or practising the piano, or building your online creative shop, or some other life endeavour that bears little or no resemblance to art. Whatever it is, a version of the present self always conceives an idea that the future self will be tasked to execute. The irony is that the present self also sabotages the future self and gets in the way of bringing that idea or vision to life. We face a constant battle between the imminent desires of the present self and the needs of the future self, and in this battle, the present self almost always triumphs. Of course, as time passes, each version of the present self ceases to exist and is subsequently replaced by a version of the future self. If we fail to prioritise the needs of the future self, we fail to actualise the life we want in the present. And while there's something to be said for living in the moment, it's worth recognising that each moment is fleeting, and there's a future self that will benefit from the decisions and choices we make now, in the present. We just need to choose wisely.

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