The One Person You Always Screw Over

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Hi there,

Back in 2009, a Stanford psychologist named Hal Hershfield ran a strange little experiment.

He stuck people in an FMRI machine and asked them to think about three things: themselves right now. A celebrity. And themselves ten years from now.

Two of the three triggered nearly identical brain activity.

Take a guess which two.

Present-you lit up the part of the brain that handles self. The celebrity and future you went somewhere else entirely.

Which means, neurologically speaking, your brain files the ten-years-from-now version of you in the same drawer as Matt Damon. A vaguely familiar character but not someone you feel very connected to.

This is, as you can probably guess, a problem

The Gap Between Present-You & Future-You

Last month I bought a beautiful blazer. Future me, I told myself, will need this.

I did not need a blazer. I own blazers. The blazer I was buying was, in fact, suspiciously similar to a blazer already in my closet. But it was on sale, and future me, I told myself with great authority, will need this.

For what? Unclear.

For when? Also unclear.

But future me, in my head, was leading an interesting glamorous, blazer-requiring life.

Three weeks later, the blazer arrived. Future-me — me — looked at it, looked at the closet, and realized past-me had once again gone shopping for a woman who does not exist.

We do this constantly. The pattern is everywhere. Every workout we outsource to "tomorrow me." Every day we swear we’ll eat cleaner tomorrow. Every dollar we promise to start saving next month…

You name it, we do it. And our brains are wired to let us get away with it.

Picture this. A stranger walks up to you and says: Hey. I need you to skip the gym today. Eat the second slice. Put $400 on the credit card. Send the risky text. Don't call your mom back.

You'd tell her to take a hike.

Now picture that the stranger is you in six hours.

Suddenly you say yes to all of it.

Your brain isn't built to feel future-you the way it feels current-you. She's not in the room when you're making the decision. That’s how we’re wired.

Every Choice Matters

In law, there's a principle called successor liability. When one business absorbs another, the new entity inherits the obligations of the old one — the debts, the contracts, the lawsuits in progress. You don't get to rebrand and walk away from what the previous version of the company committed to.

We grant this to corporations without blinking.

We refuse it for ourselves.

The version of you reading this will have inherited every decision the version of you from this morning made. The food, the screen time, the task you didn’t tackle, and the promise made and not kept.

The Other Half of the Story

Every wellness guru on earth is telling you to be present. Live in the now. Stop time-traveling.

It's beautiful advice. It might also be the wrong advice for what most of us are actually struggling with.

Because presence, as it gets practiced today, can quietly turn into avoidance. Be in the moment! Don't worry about tomorrow! And before long, "the moment" becomes a license to abandon the person who has to live in all the moments still coming.

Here's what's wild: Hershfield's follow-up research showed that when people are shown age-progressed images of themselves, i.e. when they actually see their future selves as real, they save more money, eat better, exercise more. Without any new willpower added to the equation.

The leverage isn't about motivation or mindset. It's in remembering that future you is real.

So stop asking what do I want right now? Start asking what would she thank me for?

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Final Thought

Look, I'm not going to wrap this up with five action steps or a whole "here's how to fix your life" thing. That's not the point.

The point is smaller than that. There's a version of you waking up tomorrow who's going to wake up to whatever you decide today — the text, the bedtime, the thing you finally started, the thing you put off again.

And most of us go through our days kind of forgetting that person exists. Treating them like someone we'll deal with later. Leaving them the mess.

So maybe this week, just see if you can keep that person in mind.

Just a thought, every now and then, that the person waking up tomorrow is real, and they're you, and to not make life any harder for them than it has to be.

That's it. Just remember they're there.

That's the whole thing, really.

Catch you next week,

Shakila

P.S. Here’s the results of last week’s poll.    

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