Often we give in to ourselves: eat something tasty, but harmful, postpone an important matter for later, sleep an extra 15 minutes, and then run to work. Writer David Kane offers a witty method to help you take better control of yourself and your life.
In front of me lies a beautiful banana. No stains, yellow perfection. The perfect banana and I know it won’t disappoint me when I eat it.
I want to eat it, so I don’t think that I can move it into the fourth dimension by eating it in an hour or 4 hours and it will give me about the same pleasure and give me the same amount of potassium. I forget that if I eat it now, Future David won’t get anything. So I pamper David-here-and-now at the expense of Future David.
Depending on the circumstances, future David may even enjoy a banana more than David here and now. If the banana were unripe, then by tomorrow it would have reached the ideal condition.
And yet David-here-and-now votes in his favor and already peels off the skin. As I get older, I notice that David-here-and-now is becoming more and more generous to his colleague from the future. I hope one day he can treat all the other Davids as well as he treats himself.
As long as David’s needs-here-and-now are still paramount. This is especially felt when I carelessly spend a huge amount on some nonsense, and David-of-the-future has to tighten his belt because he can hardly make it to paycheck.
It is important to learn to treat your future self with the same love with which we treat our present self.
I often pick up David-from-the-future to satisfy David-here-and-now whims. But gradually I begin to understand that David-of-the-future will at some point become David-here-and-now. Even so, I’m already the David of the future, whom the Davids of the past have often sacrificed to their own interests.
For example, now David could be much richer and leaner if the Davids-of-the-past didn’t spend so much money on booze and sweets. It is important to learn to treat your future self with the same love with which we treat our present self.
Remember the marshmallow experiment that was done in the late 60s at Stanford? The researchers sat five-year-olds in front of a marshmallow and offered them a choice: either eat it right away or wait another 15 minutes and get two marshmallows. After that, they left the children alone with the temptation.
Now David could be much richer and leaner if the Davids-from-the-past didn’t spend so much money on booze and sweets.
Only a third of them could last 15 minutes and earn a second marshmallow. When psychologists tracked the fates of these children 15 years later, it turned out that they all achieved high academic results and succeeded.
How to learn to take care of the future? I have two tips:
Accept the fact that your present is already your future. Today you are reaping the fruits of past actions. If you want to be successful in life, imagine your here-and-now self laying out the red carpet for your Future Self. Highly disciplined people are those who can boast of the benefits inherited from their caring and wise selves from the past.
– Capture moments when you let your Future Self down. Usually they happen when you go shopping, watch TV, nuzzle all kinds of gadgets, or press the cancel alarm button. Another batch of french fries or donuts is a poison that you send in a package to the future.
Believe me: your future Self is already you, and not some abstract image. And he will have to pay his bills or enjoy life, depending on what I-here-and-now will do.