The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Does the You of Today Hate the You of Tomorrow?

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

We often do things now that will make our lives more difficult or stressful in the future. We spend money, when we should save. We eat junk food, when we should exercise. We agree to commitments, when we should protect our free time. We act so thoughtlessly that it's almost like we hate our future selves.  Dr Laurie asks UCLA's Hal Hershfield to help her find the happiness balance between listening to what she wants now, and the preferences she might have in the future. And she 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 at https://futureyou.media.mit.edu/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. stranger, or enemy. She's someone I should treat with kindness and care. But that hasn't stopped me from completely ignoring her needs or sticking her with way too much work and obligation and emotional drama. Who is this person that I'm so mean to? Well, she's me. She's me only a few years or months or days from now. And research shows I'm not the only mean girl out there. Decades of psychological studies have found that many of us treat our future selves like crap. We may not feel like eating better, hitting the gym, or making tough decisions right now, but we totally expect our future selves to pick up the slack at some later date to be decided. We assume our future selves will be happy to do all the stuff we dread.

But of course, we're wrong. Our future selves don't want to deal with chores or hard workouts or boring social obligations any more than we do. Being mean to my future self is hands down the happiness challenge that messes me up the most. I'm constantly signing future Laurie up for an insane amount of travel,

too much work, and way too little rest. I'm constantly saying that she'll exercise and eat right tomorrow or next Monday, but she never does. And then she winds up feeling sad and guilty and all stressed out. The Laurie of today has got to start being nicer to the Laurie of tomorrow.

But it's going to be a tough journey, one that may even involve some time travel. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction.

You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Hey, Laurie. Hey, Hal. How's it going? Good. How are you? Good. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this. If there's one person who can save Laurie of tomorrow from Laurie of today, it's this guy. I'm Hal Hirschfield. I'm a professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making at UCLA, and I'm the author of Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. Hal's book chronicles study after study in which we think of our future selves like a complete and utter stranger. Take, for example, one clever experiment by the psychologist Emily Pronin. She told a group of college students to imagine hosting a birthday celebration tomorrow and to describe what would happen next. And most people write about the same three things. You know, there's a party, there's some alcohol, and there's a cake.

Another group was asked to imagine the same party, but in the distant future, decades from now. They write about the same stuff. There's alcohol, there's, you know, a party, there's friends. But they're more likely to mention their future self as if they're another person in the scene. People said things like, I see myself sitting there at a table with a glass of wine,

or, oh look, there I am talking to a friend from work. They described the event not through their own eyes, but as an outside observer might see it. It's subtle, but that's the third person perspective. You're another person in the scene. And I find this fascinating because it suggests that even though we have this sort of surface level assumption that our future selves and we are this sort of single entity through time,

we don't always treat ourselves that way. So if we don't feel fully connected to the person we'll be in a month or year or decade from now, it's not that surprising we don't take into account their thoughts and feelings and preferences when we're planning what we want them to do. Our future self often is this totally silent partner. It's not even that they want to speak and can't. They literally don't have a voice at the table, which means all of the decisions for our future selves, all the things that impact them in positive and negative ways are made by our current selves, who may share some of the same interests as our future selves, but also may have some competing ones. It's not that we're trying to screw over these silent partners. We're just really bad at predicting

what we ourselves will want in the coming months and years. We think we're simulating our future self's feelings, but in doing so, we're kind of relying a little too heavily on what we're feeling right now and not appreciating that our preferences, our likes, our dislikes may change over time. We think we're thinking ahead, but we're just not doing it all that well. And as I know all too well from my own life, there are many cases in which my future self gets a really raw deal. The sort of classic example that this happens with financial decisions, right? Where we say we want to save more

and yet we find ourselves spending. But then there's ones that go beyond that, right? We see this in the health space. We say we want to get up and exercise and it's so easy to just sleep in a little bit more and say you'll do it later in the day, and the day goes by, and all of a sudden it's nighttime and you haven't worked out. These things may seem trivial, but since we all do them, they can create big societal problems, ones that affect a lot of

people's happiness. Public health would be better if we didn't delay exercising and eating right. Our economy would be better if we all made sounder financial decisions today rather than putting them off. And the environment would certainly be better if we changed our consumption now rather than kicking tough choices down the line. We assume our future selves will just take care of business, and the result is major procrastination. Oftentimes we don't do something because we get anxious about it or because it just feels like it's not going to be that pleasant. And so we push it off to later. And it's not just about avoiding tasks in the present. I happily sign my future self up for lots of commitments, which means that Laurie of tomorrow winds up chronically overcommitted.

It's a phenomenon that my Yale colleague Gal Zuberman christened the Yes Damn Effect. It's the best named effect in all of psychology, in my opinion, because it's so descriptive. It's that moment that you say yes to the thing and then it arises and you say, damn it, I wish I hadn't signed myself up for that. I fall prey to the Yes Damn Effect all the time. It's yet another case where I feel like I'm trying to predict what I'd like to be doing in the future, but I end up screwing that up. It may be a little bit hard to say no, or you're worried that you might hurt someone's feelings, or maybe genuinely speaking, the opportunity seems exciting and interesting to you. And then you get to the point where you have to do the thing that you are now obligated to do. And it doesn't seem as

attractive or appealing. You could probably come up with other ways to spend that time. I'd be way happier if I could only hear what Laurie of the future really wants to do. Letting her have a say in her own schedule would solve so many problems. Like we said, your future self is a sort of silent partner at the negotiation table. So you sort of have to ask, are there ways to communicate with them? One thing that I and others have explored is a letter writing process. We often pen letters to friends or people we want to connect with better. Could sending a short note about an upcoming decision to your future self do the same thing?

What I love about this idea is that it really forces you to take the perspective of your future self. Any good negotiation coach would tell you to do the same thing about your negotiation partner. Get into their heads, take their perspective. Hal brought hundreds of college students into the lab and told them to write a letter to their future selves, explaining which topics were currently important to them and how they saw life right now. Half the participants wrote to themselves in 20 years' time, whereas the other half wrote to themselves just three months from now.

Hal wasn't so much interested in the content of these letters. He more wanted to see how writing the letter changed students' behaviors. He studied the amount of time students spent exercising in the weeks following the experiment, and the results were impressive. People who wrote to themselves in 20 years' time exercised nearly one and a half times longer than the other participants. Stopping to really engage

with our future selves, even through something as simple as writing them a letter, encourages us to treat them much better. But, Hal wondered, could an even more vivid interaction with our future selves have an even more profound effect? Maybe. But short of building a time machine, he wasn't really sure how to do that. That is, until a rap legend came back to life before his eyes. The Happiness Lab will be right back. It's the 2012 Coachella Festival. A capacity crowd is gearing up for the headline act,

Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, plus an extra, extra special surprise guest. Standing bare-chested on stage, arms outstretched, mic in hand, Tupac Shakur. The famed rapper was murdered 15 years before the festival, but when the lights came on, there he was in all his thug life glory, thanks to the magic of holograms. Tupac's posthumous appearance stunned music fans, but for psychologist Hal Hirschfield,

it was a eureka moment. And I thought, oh my gosh, wouldn't it be amazing to have people interact with their future selves via a hologram? You know, I'm standing there and I see this old version of me and I talk to them, etc. But where was Hal going to find a lifelike hologram to rival Coachella Tupac? Fortunately, his lab mate had an idea. You know, we've got this big virtual reality lab like two buildings away. I wonder if you could do something there. Hal set up a meeting with Jeremy Balanson,

the director of that lab and an expert on immersive virtual experiences. Jeremy had recently developed a VR technology that allowed people to walk through realistic scenes and to meet a whole host of lifelike avatars. Look, it's not a hologram, but it's pretty close. Teaming up with Jeremy, Hal recruited a group of college-age subjects, took their photos, handed them a state-of-the-art

VR headset, and told them to get ready to visit the future. People would walk around this virtual room and they would see sort of like blank walls in front of them and then there'd be a mirror there and staring back at them face-to- face with their future self. Each subject got to interact with a realistic VR version of their older face in the mirror. And what happened to their behavior after this fateful meeting? They made more future-oriented choices. When asked to allocate $1,000 between a future investment fund or a sooner event, Hal's subjects invested nearly twice as much money as people in the control condition. In later work, he found that bank customers who saw images of their future selves wound up saving more for retirement. Coming face to face with that future self,

meeting them, thinking about them, seeing them can really help put someone in the mindset of, you know, who will I be and what will I want and what will I feel down the line? I definitely wanted to experience the benefits of meeting future Laurie face-to-face. Maybe she could help me work out more consistently or stop me from falling prey to the yes-damn effect. I asked Hal if he'd let me play in his high-tech VR setup. Turns out a lot has changed since 2012. Now, you know, in about a second, I can take a picture of myself and there's apps that will do this and show me like a very realistic future self, much more so than the ones we were using then. It's pretty wild that the time machine I need to meet future Laurie lives right in my pocket. I think Snapchat actually does the best job at this. If you do it, it's just like, it's so good.

Okay, I'm going on Snapchat and there are a lot of filters on Snapchat. Being a middle-aged professor, I hadn't actually tried out filters like these before, except for the time I accidentally gave myself bunny ears on Zoom during a faculty meeting. Hold to take a video. Okay, that didn't work. I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to technology. Snapchat time machine. Tap the smiley face icon to access filters. Move the slider to the left to make yourself look younger or to the right to make you look older.

Several instructional videos later, I was able to sort it out. I aimed the camera at my face, slid the Snapchat time machine slider, and there she was, Laurie 30 years from now. Okay, I'm seeing myself looking really old, and that's weird. Wow. Seeing my future self was a much more emotional experience than I expected. I didn't realize my skin would look so bad. If you haven't played with aging filters like these, try one out. It's really disturbing. I look like my dad.

But really disturbing combined with a newfound panic about my current moisturizing regimen wasn't exactly the profound effect I was hoping for. Hasn't technology found a way to simulate the wisdom 60-year-old Lori will have along with her wrinkles? I'll tell you, in new work, really sort of preliminary work, I'm working with a team of researchers at MIT's Media Lab. They've created basically a future you chatbot.

It's using ChatGPT with some flourishes that they've added. And essentially, you end up in a written conversation back and forth with your future self. Ooh, a chat GPT future Laurie. I was intrigued. I tried it out and I couldn't stop. It was something like I lost 25 minutes asking my future self all these questions.

I know it's just an algorithm, but it felt so real. It actually felt like I was having this conversation and it really made me take pause. Hey, Lori, nice to meet you. Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time. Hey, Lori, nice to meet you. I'm visiting Pat Pateranutaporn and Peggy Yin at the MIT Media Lab. Pat and Peggy are the brains behind the chat GPT tool, Future You. But just going to the Media Lab was already

a bit of a trippy time machine experience. You see, I lived near the lab back in the 90s, and back then, lots of my grad school friends worked there. There's a wall celebrating the lab's history, with lots of old photos, including some of people I remembered from grad school. I know these guys. They were dorks. Interesting, interesting. It was fun to head down memory lane, but what I really wanted to do was to time travel in the other direction. So Pat and Peggy took me upstairs to meet their invention. On the way, I asked the pair

how they came up with the idea for Future You. Peggy's interest in connecting with her future self began as a college student. Throughout my life, I've just been a very active journaler. I just wrote these really long, like, three-hour journal sessions, just really reflecting on my thoughts on things and how I was sort of developing.

When I was reading back on journal entries from when I was in seventh grade, there were many points at which I felt like I wasn't really that person anymore at all. The original ChatGPT was first released around this time. Peggy decided the new AI tool might be a good way to connect with her past self. I started plugging my journal entries into ChatGPT to try to figure out what future journal entries from myself might look like. I can show you the prototype. I definitely want to try. Yeah, sure. The first step in using Future You involves answering a bunch of questions. What's your name? I told the algorithm about my hopes for the future, where I wanted to live, and what I wanted my life to be like in my 60s. After all the questions, we uploaded my photo.

Do you have your picture? Can we take a picture of you? Yeah, you can take a picture. Okay, sure. Suddenly, I was looking at 60-year-old Lari. This version was better than the Snapchat one, but it was still a little jarring. Oh, wow.

How do my eyebrows get so huge? Do all old people have bigger eyebrows? Wow, that's really weird. Pat then clicked on a new screen. And big-eyebrowed, old Laurie popped up in a chat window. She started typing to me. When I was your age, my dream was to continue sharing the science of happiness with others and make a positive impact on people's lives.

But I'm happy to say it turned out even better than I expected. Wow. Chatting with future Laurie felt like the most natural thing in the world. Pat says that this is the beauty of Future You. It combines my answers with all the data inside ChatGPT to create a conversation that feels incredibly lifelike. Future Laurie then launched into some suggestions for current me. Cherish those you love and make time for them because in the end, they are what truly matter. Don't forget to always spread happiness wherever you go.

I then got to ask my questions. What, I typed, should I be doing to find healthier work-life balance? One thing that has helped me is setting boundaries and making time for self-care activities, such as meditation, exercise, and spending quality time with loved ones. Future Lori's still following all the happiness practices. Hearing Future Me speak so positively and so vividly about my happiness practices made me feel super motivated to make sure they actually happen.

I suddenly wanted to take better care of myself. I asked about my future health. Would I take the steps necessary to keep fit? Or would I put things off until it's too late? Future Lori says, I'm happy to say that at 60, you're the happiest and healthiest you have ever been. Amazing.

Your dedication to self-care and finding joy in life has paid off. So one thing that we told people when they participate in our study is that this is not like a prophecy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is just one possible future that could happen. And we encourage them to sort of use this as a tool for reflection. Peggy has also felt the benefits of using Future You. It's made her think very differently about her academic career.

There are some assignments where I've just been like, I think it's more important now that I hand in a piece of work that I'm proud of, but don't let perfection be like the enemy of good, right? And that is like a very future Peggy sort of thing to say, rather than a present Peggy. Technology can be a powerful tool that teaches us certain skills that we can internalize. And once you have that, I don't think you need to continue over-relying on technology. I've spent so much time thinking through how this tool will work best that I can sort of be my own AI and simulate that conversation within myself without needing to pull out the website.

And Peggy has realized that her older self isn't nearly as pushy as she first expected. Future Peggy never demands that current Peggy study more or work harder. The future you chatbot seems much more worried that current Peggy isn't taking enough time for breaks or finding time for activities that she loves. I think throughout the years,

it's been harder to really enjoy singing as a hobby. And knowing that my future self would probably still be someone who just loves to spend an hour or two singing show tunes, I try not to let the side of me that thinks, okay, this time could be used for something more quote-unquote productive. Peggy's comment struck me hard. I also assumed that my older self would be a terrible taskmaster, that she'd be pissed about all my missed workouts and procrastination. I assumed she'd demand I do lots of stuff that she needed to be happy. I assumed she'd push current Lari to save a bunch of money and work out like crazy and make harsh sacrifices. But

future Lari wasn't demanding. She was compassionate. She seemed to just want me to be happy now. It's important to continue taking care of yourself, both physically and mentally. But don't worry too much. Age is just a number. And with a positive mindset, you will continue to thrive in all aspects of life. Was I yet again getting my future preferences all wrong? We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I now have young kids. And when I think about my future self now,

I often think about what sort of things will I look back on fondly and what sort of things will I regret, especially in relation to my interactions with my kids? Psychologist Hal Hirschfield has spent decades interacting with versions of his older self. At first, he assumed that paying more attention to future Hal would involve more savings, more sacrifices, more seriousness. But Hal's work has taught him that our future selves aren't as industriously minded as we often assume. The other day, my son was in the bath and he was kind of playing around.

And I, you know, I hate to admit this, but I got a little bored. Hal did what many multitasking parents do. He pulled out his phone. He started going through work emails, looking at his calendar, and trying to catch up on his news feeds. He was using the present moment to be productive, to catch up on stuff that might be useful for future Hal. But would his older self really want him to be doing that at bath time with his son? And I had this moment where I thought,

this is a short period of time. He's not going to always want to spend time with me. Am I going to look back on this time and say, I'm so glad that I saw whoever's photo on Instagram or am I going to have wanted to be there with him? But it's forced me to sort of like, rethink a lot of those interactions and say, you know, what sort of things is my older self going to want to look back at happily and say, I'm glad you did that thing with your kids. I'm glad you acted that way. Before writing his book, Your Future Self,

Hal beat himself up whenever he wasn't being productive. He naively assumed that future Hal would always want him to prioritize the years ahead over the present moment. But as Hal thought more and more about 60-something Hal, he realized that a frantic, overwhelmed life in the present moment isn't what his future self would want. Hal now has a very different perspective on how to best make tomorrow happier today. How can I look at both now and later rather than make it a conversation about now or later? We can all be short-sighted when looking into the future, and this myopia means we don't do things that will help us in the long term.

But Howe says there's an equal danger in extreme farsightedness, what researchers call hyperopia. The basic definition is when we act in ways that are almost too future-oriented, right? We think we're doing something to put ourselves in a better place in the future. And ironically, we may be making life worse for ourselves now and possibly worse for ourselves later. I have many of my own cases of hyperopia. Pushing myself to get more emails sent at the expense of spending some evening hangout time with my husband. Working overtime on this podcast when I could be sleeping or working out. Eating lunch hunched over my laptop instead of stopping to notice and enjoy the taste of my

food. There are so many times where I diligently push myself to be productive at the expense of savoring whatever's going on in the here and now. But future Laurie probably wouldn't be happy about any of that. Future Laurie doesn't want me to totally slack off, but she doesn't want me to miss out on my life either. And Hal says this extreme busyness isn't the only form of hyperopia I should worry about. His favorite example is a pervasive tendency that marketing professor Suzanne Hsu has christened the procrastination of positive experiences. The basic idea here is that we put things off until the time will be right to do something and the time never comes around. You know, we save some nice bottle of wine for just the right occasion and then finally we decide to open it and the wine has gone bad. Hal didn't

realize just how much he was calling me out with this particular example. My friend April gave me a lovely bottle of Cabernet for Christmas that was currently collecting dust on a shelf. I thought of super cute dresses I had bought for the right time that were still sitting unworn in my closet. Or that restaurant gift card from my dad that my husband and I never found time to use. Or all the scented candles and bath bombs I planned to savor after a tough day at work, but never got around to trying out. Or the thousands and thousands of frequent flyer miles in my account just waiting for the time to finally be right for that big beach vacation.

I started this episode worried about my myopia, but I was now realizing that my hyperopia might pose an even bigger happiness challenge. We can imagine putting off opportunities that we have until the right time comes around, and then that time rolls around, and maybe we're too old or too tired to take that trip that we wanted. I think you can also see this sort of thing with friendships. We may think that that friendship, that relationship will always be there. And it may take some work right now to invest in it, but we don't have the time. We should pay more attention to work. We should pay more attention to the thing that's

going to get us in a better position in the future. And you can imagine, okay, things finally settle down. And that friendship is no longer the way that it was. The strong bond is no longer so strong because we didn't spend the time on it, and instead did this other stuff that we thought was better for our future. Chatting with future Laurie made me super motivated to protect her from hyperopic errors like these. But I asked Hal, how should I do that? His first suggestion was to strive for a bit more balance. Especially if we're hyperopic, we may be motivated to do things now that will put our future selves

in a really good position. But we can also dial things back and still obtain that same goal, right? We can dial things back and spend less time on work and more time with our relationships. Or let's take another example. We can spend some more money right now. You know, if we're hyperopic in the saving domain, we can actually spend some more money right now to gain experiences that later on we'll look back on fondly. Being truly kind to our future self involves recognizing that we can be happy in the present and in the future. But to do that, we need to stop thinking in terms of our present self versus our future self. We need to instead look for ways that we can help our present and future selves at the same time. One sort of mindset shift that's really worked for me is to constantly ask myself, if I'm finding myself in danger of acting hyperopically, am I doing something now because I think in an automatic way it just has to benefit my future self?

Or is there another tax that I could take that would really benefit me now and later as well? Making this episode has encouraged me to think really deeply about how to be kinder to my future self. Which is why I have brought a delicious and long overdue glass of Cabernet into my podcast studio to savor as I finish this episode. Ah, thanks, April. It can be hard to hear what our future selves really want. We often ignore their preferences for rest and fewer obligations, but we're also prone to seeing them as harsher taskmasters than they really are. In reality, present and future us often have more shared goals than we realize. Coming face-to-face with future Laurie has really helped me get a

better sense of the balance she'd want most. I'm more committed to helping her stay healthy and less overwhelmed, but I also know that she'd want me to go after these goals with more self-compassion and presence. Oh, and I know she wants to travel, so I'm finally going to book that beach vacation, assuming my frequent flyer miles haven't already expired. I hope you'll take time to connect with your future self. You can write a letter to Next Decade You or try out a time machine app on your phone. You can also be one of the first beta testers of the MIT Media Lab's ChatGPT Future You, which excitingly is available soon. You can check out the link on our show notes. Get to know your future self better.

You'll like them, I promise. But as current Lori strives to become less hyperopic, she may need some new strategies for overcoming yet another happiness challenge, her obsession with being busy all the time. How can I fight that mild sense of anxiety that crops up whenever I try to take a break? How can I fight my usual tendency towards overwork and overwhelm? That's what I'll tackle in the next episode in this special season on my personal happiness challenges. So be sure to remind your future self to return for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.