Hal Hershfield put people in brain scanners and asked them to think about themselves. - About their personality and values.
Then he asked them to think about a stranger.
Then he asked them to think about who they'd be ten years from now.
Later, looking back at the scans of participants brains during the various prompts, two were more alike than the third:
Your future self, and a stranger.
The medial prefrontal cortex, which handles self-referential thinking, responds differently when you're thinking about your future than when you're thinking about your present. You might think it's you, but your brain sees it differently.
Your future self, neurologically speaking, is someone else.
This reframes a lot of things. We tend to describe failures of long-term thinking as laziness or weak willpower.
You might know you should save more, sleep more, and eat better, but somehow still just can't make yourself do it.
But if your future self is processed more like a stranger than like 'you', then you're not exactly being selfish. You're being generous to yourself and indifferent to someone you haven't met. Which is a different problem entirely.
Hershfield tested this. He showed people digitally aged photographs of themselves before asking about retirement savings.
Seeing a vivid, concrete version of their future self - actually looking at the older face - led people to allocate significantly more money to retirement. The gap wasn't closed by lectures about compound interest. It was closed by making the stranger feel more real.
There's a second layer to this. Not only do we treat future self as a stranger, we don't fully believe that stranger will be that different from who we are today.
Dan Gilbert found that people consistently recognise they've changed enormously in the past.
It can be easy to see how much you've grown and how your thoughts and values and interests have evolved over time. But it's hard to see you have the same capacity to be different in the future.
We tend to think who we are now is (near enough) the final version of ourselves. We say this is what I think and this is what I value; what I believe is important.
The eighteen year old thinks they're done changing. So does the forty year old. So does the seventy year old.
Gilbert called it the end of history illusion. The present always feels like arrival.
Put these two things together and you see where the trouble starts. The future self is seen as a stranger, and we don't even think that stranger will be particularly interesting or different from us. So we give them very little - very little money, very little health, very little consideration when making decisions that will shape what their life looks like.
But recognising this gives you the power to see it differently.
Every good long-term decision can be an act of empathy rather than sacrifice. Doing something in advance for someone who can't advocate for themselves yet, who is entirely dependent on your current choices, and who will one day be grateful or not depending on how seriously you took them.
Most people find discipline hard and empathy easier. Framing it the other way around might help.
