Future You

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0:45And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today's show is about you. The future you. The one who will someday reap the benefits or pay the price for what you do today. And the question is, why is it so hard, at least for some of us, to be kind to our future selves? It sounds like a relatively simple question, but it turns out to be a huge can of worms. This is psychologist Hal Hirshfield. He's a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. and he has devoted his career to studying people's relationship to their future.

1:35It all started for Hal in grad school when he was wondering why people struggled to do the things they said they wanted to do, like save money. And we started thinking about what are some of the psychological reasons why people say that they want to save but they don't? And so that really got me on this path of trying to figure out how do people sort of move through time and think about these much older versions of themselves since ultimately those are the people who are affected by any of the choices that we make. He started looking into the neurological research about our perceptions of ourselves.

2:11And there wasn't much there. But another finding really struck him. I had come across this early, what they call social neuroscience article that basically made this interesting claim that in the brain, the self can be distinguished from other people. It turns out that there's part of the brain or region of networks, the cortical midline structures, that show more activity when we're thinking about ourselves right now compared to when we're thinking about another person right now. In other words, different parts of the brain are activated if you're thinking about yourself or another person. So Hal wanted to know, would those same parts be activated if you're thinking about yourself now or yourself in the future.

3:00And I had this sort of connect the dots moment, which is, well, you know, if the brain can distinguish between me and someone else, what would happen in the brain when we ask people to think about themselves now and themselves later? Basically, would your brain identify your future self as a different person. So in 2007, Hal devised a test. So we thought, all right, let's ask people to think about their future selves and to think about other people while we scan them. As participants lay down in an MRI machine, the researchers would ask them questions about who they are right now. You know, are you funny?

3:51Are you smart? Are you sarcastic? Are you quiet? These sorts of like trait questions. Then they'd ask them the same questions about two people they probably didn't know personally, but who they could picture in their minds. Matt Damon and Natalie Portman. Okay, wait. So you're saying that you would ask them, is Matt Damon funny? Is Natalie Portman funny or smart? Yeah. So you'd be either making a judgment about Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. So one section of the brain lit up when people were asked about themselves, and a different part lit up when they were asked about Matt Damon or Natalie Portman, just as previous research had shown.

4:37But then things got really interesting, because Hal asked the participants to picture themselves in the future and asked the same questions. Are you funny? Are you smart? Are you sarcastic? Are you quiet? And the same region of the brain lit up as when people were thinking about Matt or Natalie, meaning... In the brain, the future self looks like another person. I mean, this was pretty groundbreaking when you figured this out, right? That you scientifically proved that in our brain, we think about our future self as someone separate from who we are right now. That's exactly right. I mean, I have to say it was a surprising finding to us.

5:24In fact, we actually ran the whole thing again to make sure this was right. And again, we found the same results. And so we started thinking in the same way, there could be a version of myself in the future who I really don't feel all that emotionally connected to or invested in. And if that's the case, I am probably going to live much more for today than tomorrow. Who will you be this year? In five years? In 25 years? Predict all you like, but envisioning how you'll evolve over time is incredibly hard for many reasons. On this episode, we hear ideas about what we can do to better plan our lives while allowing for the unexpected from a neurological, philosophical, and historic perspective.

6:17Psychologist Hal Hirschfeld says that when you think about future you, you might as well be thinking about a colleague who you kind of see around the office but don't really know that well. You know they exist, but you don't really know much about them. And if they were to shoot you a message and say, hey, I have to move this weekend, do you mind helping me out? It's not that you're selfish or mean, but you'd probably come up with a million reasons why you don't need to help them out. If our future selves look like that coworker who you kind of know, but not really, and you're not particularly connected to, all of a sudden, it starts to make sense why it's often really hard for us to do things today that benefit us later.

7:06In other words, like, if you want to debate between eating a high-calorie dinner versus the healthy salad, you know you should probably eat the salad because the steak and chocolate cake and extra glass of wine, that's going to be bad for your future health. But then you stop and say, well, is it my future health or just some other person? and when you start to think in those terms in some ways it's almost rational to live for today because these consequences are going to befall some other person i mean there's not every person like that right there are some people who are incredibly careful about what they eat and always thinking about their health in the future What's the range of this sort of generosity or meagerness that we feel towards ourself in the future?

8:01The question you're asking is so good because I think what you quickly realize with this analogy of the future self as this coworker you don't know is that there are lots of people in our lives who we are empathetic toward, who we will drop our weekend plans to help move. one of the things that we found is that people do vary in the sense of connection and the sense of similarity that they have to their future selves. But then you start asking, well, what's at the root of that? Now, to some extent, this is a big open question, one that we're trying to figure out. But if I have that sense of closeness, well, then I'm probably going to be more likely to do things that might benefit me later, right?

8:44And I guess I'm wondering, like, why is it so hard, do you think for people to connect with their future selves? Like, is there something innately human that makes it tough? Yeah. We live in the present, right? So, you know, anytime you think about these back and forth between current self and future self, it's me right now who needs to make quote unquote sacrifices for that future person. And, you know, that future person is abstract, right? There's this great quote from Groucho Marx, which is, you know, what have future generations ever done for us. And you know, you, you'd be forgiven for not really wanting to make all the sacrifice to do all the pain right now for this sort of uncertain gain.

9:28The other thing is that all of the temptations happen right now. You know, being able to buy things with just like my face ID and like anything that I want, I can get it right now. Even when we say we want to do things for our future selves. It can still be really hard to follow through because I'm pulled by all the temptations that exist right now. Here's Hal Hirschfeld on the TED stage. We brought people back to the lab two weeks later, and we had them take part in a financial decision-making task where they could basically decide between smaller amounts of money right now and larger amounts of money that they would have to wait for.

10:06And these were real choices. We actually paid them. And what we found was that the people who had the biggest difference in the brain between thoughts about the current self and thoughts about the future self were the worst at this task. In other words, the more the future self looked like another person on a neural level, the less likely people would be to save for that future self. Now the question, of course, is how can we get people to feel closer to their future selves and take better care of them? Okay, if we know that this future self is another person and we know that relationships matter, how can we make those relationships stronger and at some point I realized you know what this isn't like the first time somebody has asked this sort of question charities they do a really good job at getting you to feel closer to charity recipients so that you'll end up forking some of your hard-earned dollars and cents over they tell good stories making the recipients vivid and that makes them more emotional.

11:09And we know that emotions are the types of things that really sort of push the ball down the field in terms of behavior. So, you know, early on, one of the things we decided to do is try to actually use age progression technology to show people what they'd look like in the future. You know, sag the cheeks and add some age spots. There's a filter for this, right? Where you can see what you look like. 20 years from now. When I do it, it's crazy. I look just like my dad. And so one of my favorite aspects of being in a business school is that I get to also work with companies. I'm trying to put some of these ideas into practice.

11:50And so we have shown people images when they've been making sort of hypothetical decisions about saving. And when they're exposed to these future selves, they express a little more desire to save for the future. We worked with the bank and we had about 50 ,000 customers and half of them got access to these aged images and half of them didn't. They all got the same message that it's important to make a contribution to their retirement accounts. And the people who got exposed end up being about 16 % more likely to make a contribution. Now, the question is, does this work? You know, I don't want to overstate it, right?

12:26It's not like I download one of these apps and suddenly I'm living this austere life and doing everything for tomorrow, right? You know, these are relatively small effects, but as a social scientist, that excites me because anything we can do to move the needle that ends up compounding over time is really quite important. But you want to sort of pair those sorts of interventions with context where people can make a decision for some future self, whether it's saving more, signing up to work with a service that can allow you to plan an estate and will these sorts of things, right? It's another way of making that future self more vivid and more emotional.

13:09In a minute, planning ahead even if the future looks pretty bleak. On the show today, future you. I'm Anoush Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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14:59Rinse. It's time to be great. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, Future You. We were just talking to psychologist Hal Hirschfield. His research focuses on our relationship with our future selves, which, as Hal just explained, our brains perceive as a different person. But is it getting harder for some people, especially younger people, to imagine their future selves at all? I'm thinking of this 2022 study that found that young adults feel really pessimistic about what's going on in the world, whether it's, you know, coming out of a pandemic, the economy, climate change, and that 45 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 35 don't see a point in saving money as a result.

15:56They want to live in the now. And part of me says, well, how can you blame them? So how do you tell people who feel pretty hopeless about the future that they need to plan for it anyway? I don't blame them. This to me is one of the great sort of negative fallouts of all of the world-changing events that have happened over the last several years, especially since I started doing this research originally. But this isn't the first moment in history where people are experiencing this high degree of existential terror and angst, right? So during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was quite a bit of existential angst and terror.

16:37Now, one could say these are unprecedented events and the confluence of them is particularly unprecedented. One thing that I would suggest there is that time marches on, time progresses regardless of how we feel about it. So if we want to bury our heads in the sand because the future feels so scary, we can, but that doesn't mean that the future won't come. It doesn't stop it from moving forward. One takeaway from this is that it's still worthwhile while to deepen the conversations we have between now and later. I wonder, you know, is there a way to give a little bit more to the future, whether that comes in terms of saving or whatever sort of the flavor of the decision might be?

17:28It is a question of figuring out what's the allocation of resources between now and later so that later doesn't become much worse than it is or that we fear it's going to be. And I suppose on a personal level, you're saying that you need to find a balance between smelling the roses, living in the moment, and making decisions that are kinder to your future self. I think harmony might be a better word. Balance implies that we're constantly trading off. You know, you're on the seesaw, you're either up, you're down. You know, harmony, you think about it in music, It implies that two voices can be singing at the same time at different levels and almost work together.

18:12I think the same could be said for our current and future selves. There are decisions we can make right now that aren't just for the future, but could be for now and for later as well. I can spend more time with family and away from work that could benefit me now, it'll benefit me later. There also may be times where working more right now is beneficial now and it's beneficial later, but I also need to figure out where I fit in the family and friends and sort of create a word that I like as a mosaic where I'm sort of fitting the pieces in together all at once. but that sort of mindset shift I hope sort of takes away some of the constant conflict and tension between now and later it makes it possible that the two can kind of coexist that was psychologist Hal Hirschfield he's a professor in the Anderson School of Management at UCLA and the author of the book Your Future Self how to make tomorrow better today you can see his full talk at ted.com So that's the neurological perspective.

19:21And now for something a bit more philosophical about who will grow up to be in the future. Because ask most kids about their plans for their future, and they'll be pretty certain about everything they will accomplish. What do you want to be in the future? A doctor. Make all the sick people better. Using my telescope. Don't you mean stethoscope? Yeah, stethoscope. I just want to be a queen. I want to wear a dress made of diamonds, and I'm serious. You're serious? These are voices from a popular web series called Recess Therapy, where they talk to kids about their lives, their advice for grown-ups, and the future.

20:04I think the future is going to be like my dream. What's your dream? It's to be a parent. I'm going to take care of my children and make sure they don't get lost in big spaces. I think it's going to feel good. Start to vote. Do you think you would make a good president? I don't think right now, but probably in the future. I mean, doesn't that sound familiar? In the fourth grade, I said that I wanted to grow up to be an actress and that I was going to change my name to Hillary or Christina. At one point, my daughter told me she was going to be a neurologist and a baker at the same time. And if you asked journalist Shankar Vedantam when he was a child what the future held for him, he would have been just as sure of himself.

20:51When I was a small kid, I thought I was going to be a soccer star, and I put all my hopes and energies into being a professional soccer player. But as is the case for most of us. That sadly did not come to pass because my talents did not match my enthusiasm when it came to soccer. So in his 20s, Shankar thought he'd picked a more realistic path. I studied engineering in southern India. And after I finished my engineering college, or as I was nearing the end of it, I thought I was going to get an MBA and follow a corporate track, which is very different from the world that I'm in today. Shankar says that most people don't think their hopes and dreams will change much over the years.

21:39But actually, we grow to be fundamentally different people who want different things. Here he is on the TED stage. When I was 22, I was a freshly minted electronics engineer in southern India. I had no idea that three decades later I would be living in the United States, that I would be a journalist, and that I would be the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain. It's a show about human behavior and how to apply psychological science to our lives. Now, we didn't have podcasts when I graduated from college. We didn't walk around with smartphones in our pockets. So my future was not just unknown, it was unknowable.

22:20All of us have seen what this is like in the last three years as we slowly try and emerge from the COVID pandemic. If we think about the people we used to be, we can see how anxiety and isolation and upheavals in our lives and livelihoods, how this has changed us, changed our outlook, changed our perspective. But there is a paradox here. And the paradox is when we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become. But when we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we're going to be the same people in the future. Now, sure, we imagine the world is going to be different. We know that AI and climate change is going to mean for a very different world.

22:58But we don't imagine that we ourselves will have different perspectives, different views, different preferences, I call this the illusion of continuity. And I think one reason this happens is that when we look backwards, the contrast with our prior selves to who we are today is so clear. When we look forward, we can imagine ourselves being a little older, a little grayer, but we don't imagine fundamentally that we're going to be different people. And so those changes seem more amorphous. The illusion of continuity. I mean, I can think of very sort of mundane ways that's happened to me. I never really liked spicy food.

23:38And if you had told me, oh, no, you're going to end up being a person who loves spicy food, I would not have believed you. Little did I know, pregnancy would change my taste buds. But you have demonstrated on your show that it's not just the little things, this inability or this, I guess it's a lack of imagination in some ways that you will change. You will change who you fundamentally are and what you believe in. It can have huge ramifications. One of the stories that you tell is about a couple. I wonder if you could share that story. Yeah, we featured the story of John and Stephanie Rink, a wonderful story.

24:16They married when they were quite young, and then they traveled around the country. John became a basketball coach, and Stephanie became a nurse. and they were eventually living in a rural area. And Stephanie would pay house calls to people who were very sick, sometimes people who had terminal illnesses. And she would come back from these visits really shaken. And she would tell John that if she ever was struck by a terminal illness, she didn't want him to do anything that would prolong her suffering unnecessarily. She would say, John, just shoot me. Don't ever let me get to that point. Just shoot me.

24:52I heard that. I don't know how many times. As fate would have it, Stephanie, in fact, did fall sick with Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, when she was in her 50s. And she went downhill relatively quickly. I was hanging my hat on. She knows what she's going to do. The most comfortable life until it's time to die, and then making sure she died with dignity. Dignity, peace, calm, they were all what I was working toward. And the day came when she was no longer able to breathe on her own, and John rushed her to the hospital, where a nurse asked her, Mrs. Rinker, would you like us to put you on a ventilator?

25:33And she nodded yes. And that's when my jaw dropped. Stephanie wanted to be put on life support. What? No. I just want to say, no, she doesn't. No, she doesn't want that. She said, yes. John was so surprised by this that he asked her the next day, he said, you know, Steph, is that really what you want? And Stephanie said, yes. And the challenge here is that it's not that Stephanie was being inconsistent. I think it's really that Stephanie at age 35, you know, imagining what her future self would be like, imagining what it would be like to have a terminal illness, was not really able to put herself in the shoes of Stephanie at age 59, you know, suffering from a terminal illness and gasping for air.

26:23I mean, what if Stephanie had been unconscious when her husband brought her to the hospital? What if she hadn't been able to advocate for her new thinking? I mean, the decision would have been made. Yes, the decision would have been made. And if Stephanie had written out an advance directive, the advance directive would have said, you know, please do not put me on a ventilator, you know, do not prolong my suffering. But of course, the advanced directive is Stephanie at age 35 or age 40, making plans for her future self. But what if we don't actually know who our future selves are going to be? That's actually kind of a both an interesting thought, but also a terrifying thought, because throughout our lives, Manoush, we're constantly making plans for our future selves.

27:07We invest money and save for retirement, because we have an image of the kind of people we're going to be in retirement. We propose marriage and get married to people because we imagine that we know what we will want 25 years in the future when we are married to this person. But if in fact we are different people in the future than we are today, we are making plans for a stranger, a stranger who might look back at us with, you know, bewilderment or even resentment and ask us, what made you think that that is what I would want? So I think there's a temptation here to quote the old bumper sticker, stuff happens, right?

27:43And shrug and be like, well, I don't know. What are you going to do? This is life. But actually, in your talk, you share three ideas that you think can help us with our future self. Can we talk about that? The first piece of advice is accepting this idea that you are going to be different in 30 years' time. That's right. So if you buy the idea that you're going to be a different person in the future than you are today, perhaps the important question to ask is, what are things about ourselves today that perhaps we might wish to see changed? Are there elements to our personality, to our being short-tempered or impatient or unempathetic?

28:21Are there things about ourselves that we would like to change? And one of the questions then becomes, if you allow for the fact that you're going to become a different person, how do you help construct that person that you're going to become? And I think I like that idea very much because it suggests that we can be the authors of our future self, that we can actually construct this person we're going to become. The engine to do this is curiosity, which is that if we only are doing the things that we're used to doing, if we're only talking to the people who are already in us, in our circle of friends and family, we're never going to expand our horizons to imagine the people we might become.

28:56The second piece of advice that I had is to exercise humility, especially when it comes to expressing our opinions on various things. You know, social media platforms have become vehicles for grandstanding and accusation and malevolence sometimes. And so much of that, I think, is based on a false certitude that the way I think today is going to be the way that I think tomorrow. And if we had a little bit more humility, if we actually said, I think the way I think today, because my circumstances, my environment in some ways has conspired to shape who I am today in powerful ways, my environment is going to shape me to be a different person tomorrow.