Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Do you ever wonder what the future will hold, how things will turn out, say 10 years from now?

I think most of us do, and sometimes think about the future. Sometimes we even plan for it. At one end we may develop

goals of things we're going to work towards so that the future may be better. On the other

end we may be fearful thinking about the what ifs, what if I get

sick, what if I'm diagnosed with cancer, what if my finances are so tight when I retire that I just can't make it. When we think about 10

years out and how our lives will turn out, is it a good thing or a bad thing to

necessarily plan for this? I remember when I was working on my PhD a man approached

me and said, would you like to retire early and have a lot of money when you get older?

I thought, well, I don't have any money now so having money later would be great.

So we set up an appointment and he talked to me about investing in stocks and my portfolio and how I invested well in retirement plans and in

stocks that I would, when I got older, have a lot of money and I could stop working. It sounded like a great plan and for a while I was very

excited about it but it had some negative consequences too. Like fears or what if it didn't turn out or I couldn't wait to get there because life was hard.

But it's funny, when those fears kicked in, another thing also happened to me.

I learned survival skills so that if things got really

bad, I could live off the land. Seriously, I did that for a while. I actually really enjoyed

it. But there was a sense of fear there. What if things got so bad

that I needed to save myself and protect myself? I mean, I loved nature, but it went back to,

for me, was my father, had had a pretty good job when I was growing up, and he lost it.

And after he lost it, he just didn't do well for many, many, many years.

And I so much didn't want that to happen to me, that I really

got in the habit of living in the future, hoping to be better, or fearing the future that perhaps

it might be worse.

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