Future You
“Why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?”
The one constant in our lives is change. Look around at the world we live in now, and observe how different it is from the world of our childhood. The change in our external environment is easy to see. Sometimes it’s harder to see the changes in ourselves. Gilbert argues that time is a powerful force that transforms our preferences, reshapes our values and alters our personalities, but we only recognise this in retrospect, not looking forward. This is because of the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining – we can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we will be in 10 years. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished at this point in the present. Gilbert calls this the ‘end of history illusion’ – the tendency to believe that our present self is the culmination of all of our personal growth, and we have peaked in our personal development, no matter where we are in our lives.
So there is an illusion that the person we are today is the person we will be for the rest of our lives. But look back at how much you have changed in the last 10 years, or even the last 5 years. There will be little doubt that you are a different person now.
Why is this important? Most people plan for the future, but often in a way that focuses on financial stability and material things, but not necessarily on personal growth and particularly wellbeing. We invest, put money into superannuation and build a nest egg to secure our retirement. We might even invest in further education, to increase our chance of promotion or our earning capacity. And interestingly we do these things because we believe in the concept of compounding – that our investments now will grow into something much larger in the future that we will benefit from.
But do we always invest in our future selves? In our career? In our professional growth? And particularly in our future mental and physical health and wellbeing?
At every stage of our lives, we make decisions that will ultimately influence the outcome of the person that we are today. Sometimes we are happy with those decisions, but often times we might not be. It is not uncommon to see young people spend hundreds of dollars getting tattoos, and older people spending hundreds more to have those same tattoos removed. Neglecting our physical and mental health when we are younger will only come back to haunt us later in life. Whether we like it or not, we will all be different people 10 years from now. It’s just that we are not good at imagining what that looks like.
So the key here is to think about the person that you want to be in 5 years time, or in 10 years time, and start doing the things today that will enable that change to occur. Don’t just invest in your financial future, but invest your time and effort into your personal future too.
The rest of your life starts today, and the changes you make now will benefit you far into the future. Your future you will thank you.