Our Present Moment: Is It Pulled Back From the Future or Driven by the Past?
Are you navigating from the future or driven by your past?
What if we create our present by pulling from the view we have of our future rather than driving it forward from our past? I have not certainty about the ‘correct’ answer to this question. However, I’m pretty confident that It depends…on You.
The more I entertain the idea that we are pulling back from the future, the more it makes sense to me; Yesterday I wrote about the Precedence of Thought over Behavior: the key idea is:
First, there is thought, then behavior.
To achieve any result, as materializing effect in the world: let’s say graduating, getting married, or landing a job, thought will precede the actions to make them happen. Also, for any of those results, there will be elements outside your control and others under your control. Let’s call the elements outside your direct or indirect control environment and those under your control: (your) behaviors.
As for every meal, there is a recipe, in the same manner for every result, there is a set of behaviors that create it. For instance, to get a degree, you may need to study for X hours per day, ask & answer questions every week, attend classes, take notes, etc. A different set of behaviors will provide specific results: dropping out, graduating in 6 years with anxiety disorders, or in 4 years with honors.
Our behaviors (i.e. actions and ways we conduct ourselves responding to the environment) are the ones that determine the results we get at every level for everything we do.
Thought necessarily precedes and determines action. Those set of actions (behaviors) with the environment determines a specific result.
Thought is the cause and the results we see in the world are its effects, Thought -> Behavior -> Result
For that reason, seeing it backward
The results we desire to become realities we need first to create them in thought.
What If then, is not the past driving our present, but it is the future we visualize for ourselves that mostly determines what we think and how we will behave?
Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the science of Positive Psychology, has been addressing his perspective for the last 10 years: We can be pulled by the future rather than pushed by the past. I attended a conference last year in Austria where he and a few colleagues addressed this point:
For a very long, Psychoanalysis has been helping people living a miserable life to live a better life based on the idea that they were prisoners of their pasts. However, we now know well that past conditions explain only about 5% of the variance in who becomes depressed. His college Roy Baumeister brought up his perspective on consciousness: “the function of consciousness is to simulate the future, and then choose among the simulations.”
What if, through consciousness, we spy the future, get connected with how we see ourselves, and from there, we are pulling the behaviors that make us be in that way.
“We need a science of being pulled by the future as opposed to being pushed by the past.” Martin Seligman said. And in fact, this was the spin he attempted to give to Psychological science during his presidency of the American Psychological Association.
However, this philosophy brought up many critics being the most relevant:
- You can not create the future that you envision precisely as you want to. Absolutely, and that still goes in line with the fact that we can determine the types of future we desire. There is, in that case, space for both Determinism and our Agency.
- The envisioning that we do of our future is influenced by our past as experiences & upbringing, and also our genes. Absolutely, and still does not preclude that we can pull from the future.
Prospection
Thinking is designed for doing, as William James famously asserted (James, 1890), and because doing affects the future, never the past, such thinking will be designed for what is called “prospection”: the mental simulation of future possibilities.
As Gilbert and Wilson observed, “We know that chocolate pudding would taste better with cinnamon than dill, that it would be painful to go an hour without blinking or a day without sitting…we know these things not because they’ve happened to us in the past, but because we can close our eyes, imagine these events, and pre-experience their consequences in the here and now”
Become a Psychology researcher: On Yourself
One of the best ways to test a concept like this, and for sure the most fun and simple manner, is to test it with and on yourself.
Write a letter to your future self:
This is a great step into making a design of your future. Before planning what you want to do or have in the future, you must build a relationship with your future-self. Otherwise, only writing plans and wishes for the future could confuse Desire with Determination and Drive.
1.Using a face-aging app (as the free AgingBooth) or a website, get a picture of yourself Aged :-). While the image you will obtain will most likely be far-off from the real appearance you may have in the future, It is a Powerful proven tool to connect with You in the future. If possible, use 10 years from now. Otherwise 2050 (free) is ok.
2.Imagine what your life will be like in that future time. What people do you expect to be spending time with? What do you expect your career to be, and what a typical day for you would look like? Envision your family, social relationships, and your living situation.
3. Close your eyes trying to put yourself in the moment “ your life in 10 years” Consider the impact your current decisions have on you then. Write non-stop for 10 minutes, as vividly as you can, what comes to your mind.
4. Inform your behaviors, as decision, habits, ways of thinking about different topics with the image of yourself in the future, and the insights you drafted during point 3.
Run your behavioral experiment during one week. Observe: Are you navigating from the future or driven by your past?