Draft Four: Don’t screw Future You

And why the past isn’t a plan for change.

Jul 23, 2023

The artist Mircea Drăgoi has run every day since January 1, 2019.

That’s four and a half years, close to 1,700 consecutive days. He does it by the rules of the USRSA, which says the streak is alive as long as you hit 1.61 kilometers per day – on roads, tracks, treadmills, it doesn’t matter.

Mircea has not only done that – through a pandemic, working, raising three teenagers – but he’s been upping the ante. He pushed for 2K, then 4K, then 6K. These days, he runs about 8 kilometers every day, mostly through our hometown of Târgu Mureș.

I joined him for two runs last weekend, and he took me through the woods, howling every once in a while, to keep the bears at bay. Mircea is 48, runs fast, has an athlete’s gait, has no problems with his knees (thanks for asking), and he says running has made him more aware of the world: how saplings wrestle for space when a mature tree dies, how bear tracks look in the mud, what people are up when he passes them by. He actually often takes photos while running, which he then turns into large sized watercolors. (Like the one below).

Yes, this is another thing Mircea does almost daily – he draws, paints, sketches. (You might have seen his work in DoR, Scena9, Recorder, and in many projects of the tech company Lateral, including this card game conceived to connect people). He also gardens and is a 5-star Airbnb host together with his wife Angela (look up “Lekha House” whenever you need accommodation in the Mureș area).

These renaissance men are annoying, I know.

As we were wrapping up a morning run, him poised and cool, me sweating buckets and looking pained, Mircea told me he loves watching people crowd the running track and the woods in early January.

It’s the time of the resolution makers, the “I’ll start today”-ers. By the end of the month, most are gone, having deciding to once again “start today”, sometime tomorrow.

Many us want to become better versions of ourselves, yet we can’t help screwing over our future selves.

Future You has a problem of dependency – they largely become what Present You does. And most of the time, Present You just doesn’t do what Future You needs to thrive. There’s a Seinfeld bit about this. “Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’ ‘Oh, that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy.”

Think about it: you keep dreaming of a time when Future You will have an empty calendar to focus on what matters, but Present You keeps scheduling things – “coffee meeting in the middle of the day, three weeks from now? Sure!”

You want Future You to be fitter, but then Present You keeps finding reasons for “Cheat Day” or “it’s schnitzel with mashed potatoes week!” (Ok, this is me).

You want Future You to be healthier, but Present You won’t schedule medical check-ups because of all those “unexpected” coffee meetings in the calendar, and also because the tooth, the knee, the back don’t hurt that much, and that thing on the skin? Probably nothing.

Until it is. Until they all are.

I just read a slim and exciting book called Your Future Self by Hal Hershfield that goes through a lot of the research about how we keep failing at planning for the future. For example: when people are given the option of “choosing between thirty dollars in eight days and thirty-four dollars in seventeen days, people opt to wait for the larger reward. But when one of the rewards is available now – say, thirty dollars right away versus thirty-four dollars in nine days – then the preferences reverse”.

Same with food – when people had to choose among multiple eating options a week from now, they choose the healthier thing. When they had to choose for now, they more often went for junk food.

“When choosing for our future selves”, Hershfield writes, “we choose the banana. But when the present self gets involved, we end up gorging on chocolate. This sort of behavior – which is known as extreme discounting of future rewards – is associated with and even in some cases predictive of behaviors that many of us wish to avoid, like, for example, smoking, alcohol abuse and dependence, heroin and stimulant use, and even obesity and problematic gambling.”

Guilty as charged.

I’ve been complaining about my 85 kilograms and the belly that came with it for years, but I can precisely chart their arrival: more stress and more work meant less bandwidth for exercise and wise food choices, which meant more mashed potatoes and schnitzel (what?!), plus more chocolate to replace the glucose we burn daily while making decisions and task switching. Don’t even get me started on my task list of things I want to accomplish in the future but can’t, because Present Me has decided it needs Football Manager. (That’s a decision I seem to have made for over 650 hours in the past 18 months; that’s more than 3-months of working a full-time job).

I’m not saying you shouldn’t play or you shouldn’t reward yourselves. Please do.

What Hershfield does is to remind us is how tough it is to make better decisions for the future: the present is more emotionally charged, more immediate, and who the hell is that Future Me person anyway? Screw them.

This is the crux of it: the more we treat our Future Selves as Others – people we don’t know, and can’t understand – the more we’ll actively sabotage them.

“If we can treat those distant selves as if they are close others – people we care about, love, and want to support – then we can start making choices for them that appreciably improve our lives now and later”, Hershfield writes. He goes on to quote a handful of research that shows the more similarity people see between their current and future selves the more likely they are to save, exercise, and choose more ethically.

One way Hershfield tested this is with virtual reality projections, where half of the study participants encountered an aged version of themselves in a virtual mirror, and half of them didn’t. “Those who confronted their future selves ended up putting more money into a hypothetical savings account than those who did not.” (This was replicated with real money, too.)

You can’t know who you’ll be, let alone what you’ll feel and think about in the future. This is less about planning a Future You like a shopping list (although some do), and more about embracing who you’ll be with love, despite the uncertainties. Here’s a few ways to do that:

Find ways to meet your Future Self – either through aging yourself with an app, or envisioning how you want to die or be remembered.
Accept your faults. “You need to genuinely accept responsibility for your past self’s mistakes. The dining room table isn’t cluttered because of those moon cycles, or because I’ve been too busy with other chores. It’s cluttered because I chose to avoid it. It’s my fault.”
But also be understanding and kind to yourself. You avoided chores, created clutter, played hours of Football Manager because other things that week were tough as hell. You know what purpose the “cheat days” served. Now clean up that table.
Stop aiming for constant Instagram-like bliss – more and more we try and aim for prioritizing our needs and desires in a self-guided attempt to “maximize happiness”. But life is always a mixed bag of good news and bad news, actions we control, and shit we don’t control.
Understand that procrastination is a way of avoiding unpleasant feelings. Also this: when you delay something for “some other time”, you mistakenly assume Future You will be better skilled to do it, or in a better mood. Most likely it won’t be.
Write letters to your Future Self, or have your Future Self report back. Artist Debbie Millman has perfect this exercise into a “Ten-Year Plan for a Remarkable Life” – a story you can write about what your life is like 10 years into the future.
Break actions into their smallest components. Beginning reporters often freeze in front of an assignment because they keep picturing the future published article. But that’s not the smallest next action – that could be making a list of five people you want to interview, or doing one hour of internet research.

Three things.

Number one: yes, thinking about Future You and acting upon it is a privilege. Much research has been done on how scarcity impacts our bandwidth – and it’s why people in poverty can’t plan for the future; the brain is literally too busy with surviving in the present to do that. (Many people – or banks – who preach and teach financial literacy don’t seem to understand that decision making about the future doesn’t rest solely on will or discipline. It’s also how we start painting people as “other” based on “poor decision making”. See the trap?).

Number two: I am writing this for me – I wish I could remember all the ways I sabotage Future Me every day, but I don’t. If I did, I wouldn’t have scrolled mindlessly in bed for 45 minutes last night. I am my most creative, empathetic and strategic self when I think about Future Me and make decisions to help them: cut the schnitzel for a few days, cut the FOMO and loneliness generator that is Instagram etc.

Number three: this is not just an individual problem. Arguably, planning for the future is what our organizations and leaders should be doing more of. Hershfield quotes Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation, an NGO focused on long-term thinking: “Many of our present problems are because of a lack of long-term thinking in the past.”

The past makes for a terrible future.

That’s what I took away from reading Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter (Refugiul timpului in the Romanian translation). The book won the 2023 International Booker Prize and chronicles experiments that allow people to live in the past: first, it’s Alzheimer’s patients living in spaces decorated and populated according to their favorite historical time.

Then it’s nostalgics spending time in 1960s living rooms or recreating some memorable moments from the 1990s. Then it’s entire countries who decide to run referendums to turn back the clock to their supposedly “best decade”.

As the novel progresses from quirky to satirical to gloomy, it’s characters increasingly view the past as our only safe destination. We’ve been there. We enjoyed. We survived. It made us who we are. Let’s visit again.

“We are constantly producing the past”, the narrator says. “We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past.”

The future, when you look at it through the lens of the past is where we go to manufacture more past. Even so – today there is little appetite for the future.

It’s as if we’ve lived for a few decades hoping for something that didn’t materialize. Instead we got a pandemic, a war, migration, heat waves and other extreme phenomena, rising inequality, poverty, mental health crisis, new extremist movements along the political spectrum, calls for revolutions and making countries as great as they used to be. And this doesn’t even cover the capitalism-fueled nostalgia of culture, goods and services, from never-ending movie franchises, to music festivals dedicated to the past, to food that tastes like “it used to”.

Gospodinov sees our abandonment of the future, and our flirtations with the past: “The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.”

He mostly looks at Europe, at the rise of nationalist and nativist and reactionary elements, and, in their light, his fictional idea of organizing referendums to return to the past is not at all preposterous (just watch the news).

“How can we earn time when faced with a large deficit of futures? The simple answer: a return to the past. If something is certain, it’s the past. Fifty years backward are more certain than fifty years ahead. By going back 2-3-5 decades we would earn just as many. Indeed, it’s something that has already been lived, a secondhand future, but it’s still a future. It’s still better than the darkness opening up before us. Since the Europe of the future is no longer possible, let’s choose the Europe of the past. It’s simple: when you have no future, you vote for the past.” (Translation of this paragraph is mine, from Romanian.)

Gospodinov wrote this book just before the pandemic, foreshadowing the accelerating nostalgia, including of the warring kind we see in Ukraine. So many of the elections we’ve seen recently are about returning – to time as an embodiment of place. We’ll see that in four rounds of elections in Romania next year, too. The rising far right party is the now the second political force and they campaign on the past. Just remember that when millions will vote for them. That’s what they’re voting for: a time shelter.

“Some advice from me: Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly. There is. Nothing. There.”

As I was walking through my hometown, I disobeyed Gospodinov’s advice. I often visit places I left. I take photos of “last moments”. This is why I walked the route I used to walk from the Târgu Mureș apartment I grew up in (which my family sold in 1999 when I left for college) to my grandmother’s place, where I spent many afternoons after school. My school was still in place, so was the small path carved though a patch of grass behind some apartment buildings. When I arrived in front of the building my grandparents lived in – they passed away in 2001 and 2013 – it was in the middle of being renovated, fresh blinding white insulation mounted on its cracked grey carcass.

It seemed like we decided to clumsily patch the past because we couldn’t envision a different future – not for a building with a crack through it, not for a city divided, not for a country perennially caught between its potential and its day-to-day failures.

I don’t go back to mourn the past. I like going back to make sure the story is closed, so I can move forward into the future. Present Me recaps the steps I took, so it can chart a course for Future Me.

The building I grew up in; those trees weren’t there in the 1980s and 1990s.

I don’t want to return to the past, because I believe the future can be better. For me, for all of us. That’s my hope. I am hopeful about us, and our possible future. “To hope is to give yourself to the future”, Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark, “and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

Hope in the Dark is one of my favorite future-oriented manifestos. Solnit places the hopeful in a special category. Optimists, she says, think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. The hopeful? They act.

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

SIDE DISHES

I’ll put in a good word for optimism as explained by this Romanian psychologist. When the optimist confronts a setback, they look at it as temporary, specific, and not defining of the person. You failed an examen? It was this exam, today, you didn’t study enough, and you’re still a good person. Do better next time. This attitude can be learned.
It’s terribly hot everywhere – record breaking heat waves. That’s the premise from which The Ministry for the Future begins. The novel then envisions a world where we care enough about the planet to save it; well, some of it.
Speaking of the past and the future, one of my favorite novels about this tension is Prague. It’s actually set in Budapest where a bunch of American expats ponder if life isn’t actually better a little further west.
The media business is never optimistic about its future. But we’re still here. This episode of On the Media charts the death of our affair with platforms, the rise of the digital behemoth that is the modern New York Times, but also of hopeful upstarts that are its alternatives.
This fellowship offers a one-year funding and training program, granting young professionals €15,000 to develop projects meant to make a difference. Go ahead and give it a shot!
Some optimist in the form of a song: Nothing but Thieves, Overcome.