Our Future Selves Are Strangers To Us
When we make promises to other people, when we promise to love someone till death do us part, we are making a promise that a stranger is going to have to keep. Our future selves might not share our views, our perspectives, our hopes.
When we lock people up and throw away the key, it’s not just that the people we imprison are going to be different in 30 years. We are going to be different 30 years from now. Our need for retribution, for vengeance, might not be what it is today.
37
265 reads
CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
Shankar Vedantam explains the profound impact of something he calls the “illusion of continuity” - the belief that our future selves will share the same views, perspectives and hopes as our current selves - and shows how we can more proactively craft the people we are to become.
“
The idea is part of this collection:
Learn more about motivationandinspiration with this collection
How to manage workplace stress
How to prioritize and make better decisions
How to learn anything fast
Related collections
Similar ideas to Our Future Selves Are Strangers To Us
We Are Strangers To Ourselves
Introspection is blind to construction. This does not mean that our introspective guesses are never accurate, just as you might guess the correct answer to a multiple-choice question.
When you don’t know the actual facts about yourself, your consciousness pieces together a compelling stor...
Going against our nature
Change is easier when we play our strenghts, but is going to be hardest when we are not committed and when it involves going against our nature.
A hack that promises to help us can’t when it depends on us having to unlearn our deep-rooted patterns of adapting. That’s wh...
Commit to integrity
Integrity actually fuels courage. As we commit to integrity, we ignite our ability to speak up when it’s not comfortable and to share our views that might be different and therefore risky.
In doing so, we increase the extent to which we positively stand out at work, and we...
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Personalized microlearning
—
100+ Learning Journeys
—
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates