YOUR FUTURE SELF

How to act on your own behalf.

Hershfield, a psychologist and professor of marketing, offers thoughtful, research-based guidance about making decisions in the present to create a better future for yourself. “If you were able to sit down and have a conversation with your future self,” he asks, “what would you say, and what would happen as a result?” Marshaling abundant anecdotes, hypothetical scenarios, and findings from social science research, the author asserts that often we use “the emotional states of our current selves to make decisions for future selves who will no longer feel the same way.” Instead, we must recognize that our future self may have different needs and perspectives from our present self. Everyone changes over time. Rather than there being “a central self at our core,” Hershfield has found from his own research that each individual is “an aggregation of separate, distinct selves.” When we become “overly anchored on present-day concerns,” though, we imagine that a future self will feel exactly the same way as we do now. The author suggests that connecting with a vividly imagined future self can make us more likely to act on that future self’s behalf—by saving more for retirement, for example, or by choosing a healthy diet and exercising. Some strategies to help make that connection include writing a letter to a future self or looking at age-progressed images. “In a variety of ways,” he writes, “we see our distant selves as if they are other people. What matters is the relationships we have with those other people.” When deciding whether to commit to some future activity, we should weigh “how much burden and stress” the activity may create against the positive opportunities that may arise from the experience. To help achieve our goals, Hershfield proposes assorted commitment devices to help us follow a desired course of action and overcome undermining behavior.

An encouraging, practical guide for decision-making.