I WENT LOOKING
Sounds Like a Future Me Problem
I have a lot of faith in the woman I’m going to become.
Future me is organized.
She exercises consistently. She goes to bed at a reasonable hour. She remembers to cancel subscriptions before they renew.
She is also incredibly fiscally responsible. She has a budget and, more impressively, appears to follow it. She says no every time her teenage daughter asks if she can order that thing off Amazon.
She definitely won’t need anything from Target.
This arrangement extends well beyond money. There are emails she’s going to answer, appointments she’s going to make, closets she’s going to clean and habits she’s going to start.
I’ve assigned her quite a bit.
The strange thing is how confident I am in her ability to handle it.
Because, as far as I can tell, she has no additional qualifications.
She is me.
Just later.
So I went looking for why we do this.
Future me is technically me
There’s a concept in psychology called future-self continuity, which describes how connected we feel to the person we’ll be later.
We know, logically, that the person waking up six months from now will still be us. Psychologically, she can feel more like an acquaintance. People who feel more connected to their future selves save more for them. They’ve even built up more real money over their lives (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009).
Which makes sense. It’s much easier to create problems for someone who isn’t here.
Researchers at Princeton tested this with something worse than a savings account. They asked people how much of a disgusting liquid they’d drink for a science experiment. People signed their future selves up for more than they were willing to drink right then, and treated future-them about the same way they treated a stranger (Pronin et al., 2008).
So technically, she’s me. Functionally, she’s a coworker I’ve never met, and I keep volunteering her for things.
Present me is extremely real.
I know what she wants. I know that she’s tired. I know that cooking sounds less appealing than ordering something. I know that the thing in my online cart is on sale, which obviously changes the financial analysis considerably.
Future me is more theoretical.
She always seems to have plenty of energy.
She has no competing plans.
And for reasons I cannot explain, she opens her mail the day it arrives.
This creates a very convenient division of labor.
Present me gets to make the decision.
Future me gets to deal with it.
She’ll make up for it
There’s another piece of this that researchers call present bias. We give more weight to what we can have or avoid right now than to consequences sitting somewhere in the future (O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999).
I can spend the money now and save next month.
I can stay up late tonight and go to bed early tomorrow.
I can skip today and start Monday.
None of these decisions requires me to abandon the larger goal.
That would be irresponsible.
Instead, I simply reschedule becoming the person who accomplishes it.
And the delay usually comes with a small prediction attached.
I’ll be better about it later.
She’ll catch up. She’ll spend less. She’ll have more discipline. She’ll somehow be better equipped for this than I am right now.
The same economists have a name for people who think this way. Some of us know our future selves will face the same temptations we do. They call those people sophisticates. The rest of us assume future me will be immune. They call us naifs.
Naifs are the ones who keep putting things off, because tomorrow always looks like the easier day to start.
I would like to formally object to the name.
I’ll get to it tomorrow.
Unfortunately, she keeps showing up
This system would work beautifully if future me stayed in the future.
She does not.
Next week becomes this week.
Tomorrow becomes today.
Monday arrives with unnecessary regularity.
And the highly capable woman I assigned all of this work to finally appears.
Except now she’s present me.
Which means she’s tired.
She has things going on.
She would also prefer not to make that phone call.
And apparently she still likes Target.
This is where the whole arrangement starts to feel slightly unfair.
Every version of me inherits the decisions made by the one before her while assuming the next version will be better equipped to deal with them.
It’s less like personal growth and more like a very poorly managed relay race.
Nobody is running particularly fast, but we are extremely committed to passing the baton.
I don’t think the answer is to always choose the responsible thing now.
Sometimes tomorrow really is the better time.
Sometimes we’re tired because we’re tired.
Sometimes buying the thing is fine.
Sometimes Monday is a perfectly reasonable day to start.
What interests me is the story I tell myself when I make those choices.
I rarely picture future me arriving with the same habits, temptations and excuses I have now.
I picture the improved model.
The research suggests I’d do better to picture her more clearly.
When researchers showed people digitally aged versions of their own faces, those people put more money toward retirement (Hershfield et al., 2011).
Another team had people write a letter to themselves 20 years in the future. They exercised more in the days that followed. People who wrote to themselves three months out didn’t see the same bump (Rutchick et al., 2018).
So I had AI age a photo of me and put it by the front door, where I see it every time I walk out of the house.
It’s worth a try, right?
So far, she looks less tired than I do.
She must be going to bed at a reasonable hour.
Every morning she watches me leave, silently reminding me to start pulling my weight.
Preferably before she gets here.
References
Ersner-Hershfield, H., Garton, M. T., Ballard, K., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., & Knutson, B. (2009). Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(4), 280–286. https://dlab.sauder.ubc.ca/sjdm/journal/9310/jdm9310.html
Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23–S37. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.SPL.S23
O’Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (1999). Doing it now or later. American Economic Review, 89(1), 103–124. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.89.1.103
Pronin, E., Olivola, C. Y., & Kennedy, K. A. (2008). Doing unto future selves as you would do unto others: Psychological distance and decision making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(2), 224–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167207310023
Rutchick, A. M., Slepian, M. L., Reyes, M. O., Pleskus, L. N., & Hershfield, H. E. (2018). Future self-continuity is associated with improved health and increases exercise behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 24(1), 72–80. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000153