Future Self

Invisibilia

NPR

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Social Sciences, Science

4.6 • 22.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2017

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do you want to be when you grow up? This is a question we ask children, and adults. In American culture the concept of the future self is critical, required. It drives us to improve, become a richer, more successful, happier version of who we are now. It keeps us from getting blinkered by the world we grew up in, allowing us to see into other potential worlds, new and different concepts, infinite other selves. But the future self can also torture us, mocking us for who we have failed to become. We travel to North Port, Florida, where the principal of a high school did something extreme and unusual to help his students strive for grander future selves - a noble American experiment that went horribly wrong. If you or somebody you know might need help, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255 or at suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hannah? Yeah. Today we start with the dance party.
0:07.3	Picture a big hall with like 300 kids. Everybody crowded in and sweaty,
0:12.0	getting funky.
0:17.7	The one very unusual thing about this dance party though, it's in an orphanage in Syria.
0:24.6	Yeah, it was awesome. I still remember everybody was just dancing.
0:29.0	This is Chris Setic. He was one of the kids at the party, which happened back in 2007.
0:34.2	Chris was 10 at the time and he says he'd never seen people move this way. He'd never heard this kind
0:39.8	of music and he was dumbfounded. He says he started rushing around trying to understand
0:45.9	who was the source of this magical music. I was asking people what's happening and like,
0:52.1	what's that and what's that. And then the source of all of this awesomeness became clear.
1:00.3	Home. There's a DJ.
1:04.7	He couldn't take his eyes off of her. Yeah, she had like a bunch of CDs and you know big headphones
1:11.2	and I'm like, what's happening right there? Chris was captivated and was it like the kind of thing
1:18.6	where you saw her and all of a sudden you were like, that will be me? Yeah, like I want to be the
1:29.1	one who's doing that.
1:30.0	Now lots of 10 year old boys see a person doing a cool thing and think, I want to be that.
1:50.4	But for Chris, this was way more. Chris was shy, a wallflower. He was a kid living in a Syrian
1:57.0	orphanage. He had no parents, very limited access to the outside world. But in that moment,
2:03.5	he suddenly saw a future, a person that he wanted to be.
2:07.6	Home, I want to be the DJ.
2:11.2	For the next decade, no matter how awful the situation Chris found himself in,
2:15.7	this future version of himself was like a beacon.
	...

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