Connect to your future selves

While your connection to your past self is mostly about your sense of identity, your connection to your future self is more practical. Broadly, it’s about building a better life. You do this through a timeless policy of charity and trust. Act charitably toward your future self, and in turn you inherit a better life. Be accountable to your past, and in turn you have a trustworthy future self whom you can hand work off to. Disconnection Many people are woefully disconnected from their future selves, living in a kind of eternal present where “the future” is an imaginary place, and their “future self” is a stranger whose problems don’t matter. Some examples that come to mind: The internet is a graveyard of barely-started projects. I was looking for Substack names for a new writing project, and for every name I tried, I found a person who claimed it years ago, wrote 1-2 posts (or just “coming soon”), and then never posted again. If you’ve ever shopped for domain names or landed on a random person’s website by some other means, you’re familiar with this pattern. Their latest post gushes about, “Whoops I haven’t posted in so long, sorry, but I’m going to be posting more consistently from now on!” and it’s from 2013. And it’s tempting to judge them, but I know the exact experience that causes people do this, because every time I publish a post, I distinctly feel like “that was easy, I could do this more often, like once a week for a while.” But I know better: that feeling is miscalibrated, it’s present-bias, and it can disconnect me from the reality of my future self. We get an emotional high from finishing work, and in that highly motivated state we commit to more work that our future selves just can’t deliver. At my job I often see this pattern where someone gets excited about a new project or initiative, yet somehow I know the momentum isn’t going to last. Maybe it’s that I know their other responsibilities will pull them away; maybe I think they’re underestimating the work it’ll take; but it’s just a sense I get, and it’s always right. I know if I just wait a week or two, the project will stall out and be completely forgotten. Closely related to the above is the planning fallacy. People are consistently bad at guessing how long a project will take. They underestimate it every time, and even when they know they underestimate it every time, they still underestimate it every time. I see this firsthand, a lot. Being bad at planning is both a cause and symptom of a low-control lifestyle, which I’ve written about before. If you’re not connected to your future self, you can’t plan. Then what you call “planning” is really just wishing. And when your plans fail, you’ll be surprised, but no one else will be. When you ignore your future self, you demonstrate high time preference: you systematically prefer rewards and pleasures that come right now, even if it means depriving your future self of better things. High-time-preference people are easy to predict, and that’s how they get taken advantage of. You can convince them to buy junk food on their way out of the pharmacy, just by putting the junk food in front of their face. You can get them into credit card debt and gouge them with interest payments, just by letting them spend money they don’t have. Closely related: people can’t do things at the proper time, even if they once intended to. “Sign up now, cancel anytime!” says the checkout page on a service they don’t need. The important subtext, never spelled out, is “But you won’t, lol.” If the time of action and the time of benefit don’t line up perfectly, the thing never gets done. The timeless justification So, there are warnings listed above and lifestyle benefits listed below, but I feel like the tallying of benefits doesn’t quite work here; there’s a mental shift that’s needed. It was easy to see the benefit of Connecting to our past selves: I can recall things from my past that make me smarter or wiser right now. But, how could it benefit me to connect to my future self? Causation only goes one way; my future self hasn’t happened yet! The decision to care about your future self is not a causal transaction, it’s a policy. Policies are timeless decisions. The result, of course, is that the future self you arrive at will have already been cared for by a past self. You didn’t cause it in a single moment, but you installed it as a stable pattern in your life. This is roughly the intuition behind timeless decision theory: a decision is not just a causal event, it’s also an expression of the kind of person you are. It addresses the question, “What kind of person does this make me, and what kind of future do people like me tend to find themselves in?” If you’re thinking in this frame, treating your future self well is justified entirely by you appreciating or wishing for good care from your past self. In this frame, you solve problems timelessly. After they crop up, you respond by making sure they won’t happen again. For