Psst. Your future self is trying to tell you something.
On this week's episode of Write About Now, I time travel with psychologist and author, Hal Hershfield, to connect with our future selves and find out how it can help the present us.
When you think of your future self, who do you see? What are you doing? Where are you living? What have you achieved? What are your values?
And why does this even matter?
My guest today on this week’s episode of Write About Now is psychologist Hal Hershfield, a Marketing and Behavioral Decision Making Professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and the author of the new book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today.
Hal has spent over a decade researching and exploring how connecting with our future selves can both improve our lives right now and help us achieve our goals and hopes for the future.
I was intrigued by this idea for two reasons.
I spend most of my life in the future worrying about things that haven’t happened yet. So how could I benefit from connecting with this disaster of a person?
Hal has done a ton of research on this concept, so his findings are based on empirical data. In other words, he’s no uncredentialed self-help guru.
In our conversation, we talk about how to identify your future self and how it can help in the present.
Here are some excerpts from my interview with Hal Hershfield (with some edits for clarity).
What do you mean when you talk about the future self?
To some extent, it is a very abstract concept. On the surface, it's any version of you that exists at some point in time in the future. However, you can get more specific because part of what really matters is the goals that we're thinking of. Let's say I have a goal of saving a certain amount of money so that I can buy a new car or, laughably, afford a down payment for a house in LA. There's a specific time point I've got in mind, two or three years or ten years, or whatever it is.
But I could also have a future self in six months. Let's say I've got a big article I'm trying to write, and I want to get that done in six months. There's a me at the other side of that. I can't just snap my fingers and wake up then and hope that it's done right. I've got to figure out what tomorrow look like, and then the day after tomorrow, so that I can make a smoother connection between my present self and that eventual future self.
Why does connecting with your future self matter for writers?
It's not about connecting to our future selves per se, but it's about recognizing that during a lot of this back and forth between present and future selves, it's always the present self who is “sacrificing.” That's the version of me who's gotta spend less. That's the version of me who's gotta eat healthier and go to bed earlier, and that's no fun.
But how can we make the present-day “sacrifices” feel subjectively easier to undertake so that people are more likely to go through with them? The idea of writing a 7,000-word chapter in the next three weeks was daunting for me. But then I would try to break it down, ignoring word count for a second. What if I blocked off two hours to write today? Or what if I just started writing for like five minutes?
Social psychologists talk about channel factors. You think about how water flows down a channel. It goes the easiest way it can go. People are the same way.
One of the things that social psychologists recognize is if I open up the channel factors and make it easier to go from point A to point B, I'm more likely to get someone to take an action.
One of my old colleagues, Danny Oppenheimer, taught me this. If you're writing and doing well, don't close out Word or even turn off your computer — just leave it open. The next morning when you wake up, it's the first thing you see, and you get right back into it. It opens up that channel rather than having to start fresh.
So, my research is not just thinking about the future for future sake. It’s really about setting up a stronger relationship with our future selves so that when we make decisions now, there's some—gosh, this is going to sound really like Southern California — but there's some intentionality.
How do you respond to people who say the future is just an illusion? It’s more important to live in the present—the Power of Now.
I actually think that there's a world in which the two philosophies can come together. The idea that there's only the now, in some ways, there's truth to that. There's only this moment. We're only living in the present. I think there's also a great deal of importance to the idea that we be in the present moment and are there for it so that we don't miss out on things.
But that also does a disservice to our future selves. Because if we're walking around not focused and not absorbing what's happening, I don't think that sets up a good scenario for our future selves either.
My interpretation of this line of thought isn't that one should be hedonistic. There's a version of living in the now that is totally hedonistic—that there's no tomorrow, and I might as well do whatever I want. And I don't think a Buddhist would say that. I don't know if this is going to sound weird, but I can be present in planning for the future and, at the same time, live my life today.
I actually think that it would be a mistake to somehow only live for the future, or to only live in a way that ignores the future where you're so present that you're just like, we’ll see what happens. Then you have no responsibility to anything but the now.
What are some practices to help you get in touch with your future self?
One of the main things I would start with is a conversation between current and future selves.
Identify a time point in the future. Think about what some of the goals are and think about that period. Is it five years? Is it ten years from now? And then the exercise I really like is first to write a letter to that future self, then write a letter back from that future self.
Step into the shoes of that future self and write a letter back from that future self to your current self. I like that so much because it really ups the empathy. It forces you to step into the shoes of your future self and see the world through its eyes.
PS There’s an app that saves the letters you write to your future self, emailing them to you at a future date. Check out: Futureme.org.
To hear more of my interview with Hal Hershfield, listen to the podcast and share it with a friend.
Happy writing!
Jon