2024-07-01
28 分钟We often do things now that will make our lives more difficult or stressful in the future. We spend money, when we should save. We eat junk food, when we should exercise. We agree to commitments, when we should protect our free time. We act so thoughtlessly that it's almost like we hate our future selves. Dr Laurie asks UCLA's Hal Hershfield to help her find the happiness balance between listening to what she wants now, and the preferences she might have in the future. And she steps into an AI time machine to get some happiness advice for herself decades from today. Try talking to the "you of tomorrow" using the MIT Media Lab's Future You chatbot at https://futureyou.media.mit.edu/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think of myself as a nice person, but there is someone who I'm really mean to.
This individual that I constantly torment isn't some stranger or enemy.
She's someone I should treat with kindness and care.
But that hasn't stopped me from completely ignoring her needs or sticking her with way too much work and obligation and emotional drama.
Who is this person that I'm so mean to?
Well, she's me.
She's me only a few years or months or days from now.
And research shows I'm not the only mean girl out there.
Decades of psychological studies have found that many of us treat our future selves like crap.
We may not feel like eating better, hitting the gym, or making tough decisions right now, but we totally expect our future selves to pick up the slack at some later date to be decided.
We assume our future selves will be happy to do all the stuff we dread.
But of course, we're wrong.
Our future selves don't want to deal with chores or hard workouts or boring social obligations any more than we do.
Being mean to my future self is, hands down, the happiness challenge that messes me up the most.
I'm constantly signing future Laurie up for an insane amount of travel, too much work, and way too little rest.
I'm constantly saying that she'll exercise and eat right tomorrow or next Monday, but she never does.
And then she winds up feeling sad and guilty and all stressed out.
The lorry of today has got to start being nicer to the lorry of tomorrow.
But it's going to be a tough journey, one that may even involve some time travel.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.