Why We Sabotage Our Future Selves

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 14.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We often do things that will make our lives more stressful or difficult in the future, like overspending when we should save, eating junk food that makes us feel bad, or agreeing to committments when we should protect our free time. Why does it seem like we're always sabotaging our future selves?

University of California Los Angeles' Hal Hershfield helps us find the balance between listening to what we want now and the preferences our future selves might have. And Dr. Laurie 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.

Experts Mentioned:
- Gal Zauberman, Professor of Marketing, Yale School of Management

Resources Mentioned:
- “Doing Unto Future Selves as You Would Do Unto Others: Psychological Distance and Decision Making," (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2008)
- Tupac Hologram Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre Perform Coachella Live 2012
- Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson (2018)

Related episodes of “The Happiness Lab”:
- “How to Kick Bad Habits (and Start Good Ones)”
- “For Whom the Alarm Clock Tolls”
- “Choice Overload”
- “Stop Endlessly Chasing the ‘Next Big Thing’”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:30.1	Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:35.0	The world we live in isn't perfect.
0:38.0	This is all wrong.
0:40.0	I say put mental health first.
0:42.0	But it doesn't get any better on its own.
0:44.5	I stand before you as a concerned citizen.
0:47.5	That's why we talk to activists about how they do what they do,
0:50.9	and what inspires them to keep going, because we're all about change.
0:54.4	Listen to stories that give us all hope on all about change wherever you get
0:59.2	your podcasts.
1:00.2	Yeah, sweetie. Gosh can! Pushkin.
1:21.0	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
1:24.6	stranger or enemy. She's someone I should treat with kindness and care. But that
1:29.4	hasn't stopped me from completely ignoring her needs or sticking her with way too much work and obligation and emotional drama.
1:37.0	Who is this person that I'm so mean to? Well, she's me.
1:41.0	She's me only a few years or months or days from now.
1:45.1	And research shows I'm not the only mean girl out there.
	...

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