Essential questions to ask your future self | Meg Jay, Whitney Pennington Rodgers

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How much do you think about your future self? If your answer is not much, you're not alone. It can be difficult to plan for a version of yourself you haven't met yet, says psychologist Meg Jay. Sharing how to close the empathy gap between you and your future selves, she outlines courageous questions to ask about how your present and future can align, so you can begin to achieve your goals. (This conversation, hosted by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was part of a TED Membership event. Visit to become a TED Member.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Our talk today is a gift to our future selves. Clinical psychologist Meg Jay shares the questions we should be asking of our present selves in order to have a more fulfilling future. This is a shortened version of her talk and conversation with Ted's current
0:21.3	affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rogers, recorded at a TED membership exclusive event.
0:26.9	You can become a founding TED member at TED.com slash membership.
0:32.5	We need to talk about the empathy gap. So the empathy gap is why we sometimes hate on people on the other
0:39.4	end of the political spectrum. Or it's why maybe we shrug our shoulders at the problems of those
0:44.8	who look different or live different or love different than we do. It's why we almost certainly
0:50.7	aren't doing enough to protect our kids and grandkids from climate change.
0:55.8	It can just be difficult sometimes to care about people that we don't know or to do right by
1:01.6	people who don't even exist yet. But what if I told you that that same empathy gap can also get in
1:08.6	the way of us doing right by ourselves in our 20s and beyond.
1:13.7	And before I go on, let me say that everything I'm about to talk about also applies to all
1:18.6	of us out there who are well beyond our 20s. But for a little bit of background, in 2013, I gave
1:24.4	a talk about why our 20s matter. So it's about almost 10 years later. I'm still a
1:30.1	clinical psychologist who specializes in 20-somethings. But these days, the 20-somethings I see,
1:36.4	they know their 20s matter. So they want to get them right. They want to move to the right city.
1:41.6	They want to take the right job. They want to find the right job. They want to find the right partner.
1:45.3	They want to have the right answers.
1:47.8	Well, the bad news is there are no right answers.
1:51.0	There are no right answers for where you should live or where you should work or how you
1:55.0	should settle down.
1:56.4	These are what are called large world problems because there are just too many unknowns. No app,
2:02.7	no algorithm, no enneagram can ever solve these problems or answer these questions for you.
	...

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