Works in progress that mistakenly think we’re finished

The Psychology of Your Future Self - Dan Gilbert

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Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.

Gilbert explores this paradox in greater, pleasantly uncomfortable-making, strangely reassuring detail in Stumbling on Happiness — one of these essential books on the art-science of happiness. He writes:

What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you’ve been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss’s office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol?

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something — a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger — we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.

[But] our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack.

This gives another layer of meaning to Albert Camus’s assertion that “those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” Our in-the-moment principles and attachments, after all, may be of no concern to our future selves in their pursuit of happiness.

I thought this may be of interest to other Jedi, as the thinking chimes with a lot of my own beliefs around the nature of human life within the constant change and flow of the Force.

Any thoughts? Reactions? Angry denials? :laugh:

I hate when people say to me that I should do something (or not do something) in case I regret it one day; if it's all the same, I'd rather risk the possibility of the regret in the future, than the almost certainty of regret now. In fact, I'd rather I didn't worry about regret at all.

Our person each day from the next is different, perhaps I'll let tomorrow me worry about tomorrow?

Unfortunately though, life requires we do at least some thinking for our future selves, even if won't have any bearing on our future happiness.

Tomorrow morning me isn't going to regret, per se, but is likely to be really cranky with the tonight me for not having been able to get to sleep ...

I just did some writing about regrets and found that I really don't have them (much). Some things in life about which had I chosen otherwise (a so-called 'wiser' choice) I would have quite probably suffered even more greatly from the benefits (sic).

Likewise, some of my fùùù-ùps have literally saved my life. Go figure ...

Nice posts, tzb & Edan (I like Dan Gilbert too).