14 Jul Becoming Friends With Your Future Self
Happiness can be in the past, the present and the future.
Happiness can be reminiscing about good times, enjoying simple pleasures, and/or planning fun and exciting adventures.
But there’s no doubt that an important part of happiness is future-focused; it’s about believing things can be good or better.
This is where hope and optimism come in, and where your belief in yourself, and your future self, are so important …
via Psychology Today by Marianna Pogosyan
KEY POINTS
- People often don’t make choices in the present that will benefit their future self.
- The bias of being fixated on the future at the expense of the present is called hyperopia.
- Making the future more vivid can help create an emotional connection between the present and future selves.
On average, humans get around 4,000 weeks of lifespan. All that we ever dreamed of achieving, all our joys and heartache, all our ever-fleeting moments of experiencing existence occur within this “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short” reserve of time, writer Oliver Burkeman reminds us.
Despite being well aware of its finitude, our relationship with time is often more inept than grateful. Take, for example, your notion of the future you. How do you feel towards the person you’ll be in five months or five years from now? To explore this question, researchers have examined how much people are willing to sacrifice their immediate comfort for the benefit of their future selves — for example, by saving for retirement or foregoing a luscious piece of cheesecake for an apple.
It turns out, our future selves appear so distant to our present selves, that we tend to conduct our lives as if tomorrow’s us is someone else’s problem. We’d rather spend the money now and tuck into that second serving of dessert, even while knowing that we’re not doing any favors to ourselves down the timeline. “We’ll worry about the future when it gets here,” our actions seem to declare. Researchers call this over-fucus on the present at the expense of the future myopia.
When it comes to happiness, however, it’s our present selves that habitually get deprived. How often have you deferred feeling happy to the future you? In the middle of a busy workday, you think, I’ll be happy when I get this done. When you get the task done, you think, I’ll be happy when I’m on vacation. Even as you lounge at the very beach where you were certain the future you would finally find happiness, you start anticipating the delights that are yet to come, I can’t wait ‘til dinner…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE