Second, as we make pronouncements on social media or in political forums, or at dinner parties, let’s bear in mind that among the people who might disagree with us are our own future selves. So when we express views with great certitude and confidence let’s remem...

Philosophers have talked for many years about a thought experiment; it’s sometimes called the “ship of Theseus”. The great warrior Theseus returned from his exploits, his ship was stationed in the harbor as a memorial. And over the decades, parts of the ship began to rot and decay, and as...

But at a psychological level, each new layer that’s put down is not identical to the one that came before it. The famous plasticity of the brain that we’ve all heard so much about means that, on an ongoing basis, we are constantly becoming a new person. This has...

All of us have seen what this is like in the last three years, as we slowly try and emerge from the COVID pandemic. If we think about the people we used to be three years ago, before the pandemic, we can see how we have changed. We can see how anxiety and isolation and upheavals in our lives and ...

When we pass laws, we often do so with an intent of making a better country, improving our country. But any country that’s been around for a few decades has numerous laws on the books that made perfect sense when they were crafted - in fact, that were seen as enlightened when they were cr...

Our future selves are going to be different, but they’re also going to have capacities and strengths and wisdom that we do not possess today. So when we confront opportunities and we hesitate, when we tell ourselves, “I don’t think I have it in me to quit my job and start...

One reason this happens is that when we look backwards, the contrast with our prior selves to who we are today is so clear. We can see it so clearly that we have become different people. When we look forward, we can imagine ourselves being a little olde...

Shankar Vedantam has 3 pieces of advice on how to wrestle with this wicked problem. And it is a wicked problem, because all of us spend so much of our lives trying to make our future selves happy. And we don’t stop to ask, “Is it possible that in 20 or 30 years, ...

Our cells turn over all the time. The people we were 10 years ago are not the people we are today. Biologically, we have become a different person. But something much more profound happens at a psychological level. Because you could argue a ship is not just a

There is a paradox here, and the paradox is when we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become. But when we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we’re going to be the same people in the future. Now sure, we imagine the world is going to ...