Being in Time

How much should we value the past, the present, and the future?
A figure looking at his reflection as an abstract strip moves past.
Illustration by Jonathan Djob Nkondo

The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds—about as long as it takes, the psychologist Marc Wittmann points out, for Paul McCartney to sing the words “Hey Jude.” Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window. Practitioners of mindfulness meditation often strive to rest their consciousness within it. The rest of us might encounter something similar during certain present-tense moments—perhaps while rock climbing, improvising music, making love. Being in the moment is said to be a perk of sadomasochism; as a devotee of B.D.S.M. once explained, “A whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can’t look away from it, and they can’t think about anything else!”

In 1971, the book “Be Here Now,” by the spiritual leader Ram Dass, helped introduce yoga to the West. Much of the time, we are elsewhere. In 2010, the psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a study in which they used an iPhone app to ask volunteers, at random points throughout the day, what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how happy they were. The researchers found that, in about half of their samples, people’s minds were wandering, often remembering the past or contemplating the future. These periods were, on average, less pleasant than ones spent being in the moment. Thoughts of the future are often associated with anxiety and dread, and thoughts of the past can be colored by regret, embarrassment, and shame.

Still, mental time travel is essential. In one of Aesop’s fables, ants chastise a grasshopper for not collecting food for the winter; the grasshopper, who lives in the moment, admits, “I was so busy singing that I hadn’t the time.” It’s important to find a proper balance between being in the moment and stepping out of it. We all know people who live too much in the past or worry too much about the future. At the end of their lives, people often regret most their failures to act, stemming from unrealistic worries about consequences. Others, indifferent to the future or disdainful of the past, become unwise risk-takers or jerks. Any functioning person has to live, to some extent, out of the moment. We might also think that it’s right for our consciousnesses to shift to other times—such inner mobility is part of a rich and meaningful life.

On a group level, too, we struggle to strike a balance. It’s a common complaint that, as societies, we are too fixated on the present and the immediate future. In 2019, in a speech to the United Nations about climate change, the young activist Greta Thunberg inveighed against the inaction of policymakers: “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” she said. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you.” But, if their inaction is a betrayal, it’s most likely not a malicious one; it’s just that our current pleasures and predicaments are much more salient in our minds than the fates of our descendants. And there are also those who worry that we are too future-biased. A typical reaction to long-range programs, such as John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program or Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is that the money would be better spent on those who need it right now. Others complain that we are too focussed on the past, or with the sentimental reconstruction of it. Past, present, future; history, this year, the decades to come. How should we balance them in our minds?

Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, contemplates these questions in her book “Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.” Sullivan is mainly concerned with how we relate to time as individuals, and she thinks that many of us do it poorly, because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should happen. Maybe you have a “near bias”: you eat the popcorn as the movie is about to start, even though you would probably enjoy it more if you waited. Maybe you have a “future bias”: you are upset about an unpleasant task that you have to do tomorrow, even though you’re hardly bothered by the memory of performing an equally unpleasant task yesterday. Or maybe you have a “structural bias,” preferring your experiences to have a certain temporal shape: you plan your vacation such that the best part comes at the end.

For Sullivan, all of these time biases are mistakes. She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives the past, the present, and the future equal weight. She arrives at her arguments for temporal neutrality by outlining several principles of rational decision-making. According to the principle of success, Sullivan writes, a rational person prefers that “her life going forward go as well as possible”; according to the principle of non-arbitrariness, a rational person’s preferences “are insensitive to arbitrary differences.” A commitment to being rational, Sullivan argues, will make us more time-neutral, and temporal neutrality will help us think better about everyday problems, such as how best to care for elderly parents and save for retirement.

Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future. There are occasions when this kind of near bias can be rational: if someone offers you the choice between a gift of a thousand dollars today and a year from now, you’d be justified in taking the money now, for any number of reasons. (You can put it in the bank and get interest; there’s a chance you could die in the next year; the gift giver could change her mind.) Still, it’s more often the case that, as economists say, we too steeply “discount” the value of what’s to come. This near bias pulls at us in our everyday decisions. We tend to be cool and rational when planning for the far-off future, but we lose control when temptations grow nearer in time. In an essay called “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command,” from 1980, the economist Thomas C. Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, described the supposedly rational consumer as someone who actually “sits glued to the TV knowing that again tomorrow he’ll wake early in a cold sweat unprepared for that morning meeting on which so much of his career depends.”

We struggle to defeat this near bias—to be like Ulysses, who had his sailors tie him to the mast so that he could hear the song of the Sirens without following them into the sea. Dieters buy food in small portions. Heavy drinkers hand their car keys to their friends. My younger son once had an alarm clock that ran away as it went off. You can try negotiating with yourself: I’ll eat what I want but it has to be keto; I’ll eat what I want but only between noon and 8 P.M.; I’ll eat what I want but only on a cheat day. I can go on Twitter, but first I have to work on this article for thirty more minutes.

If near bias is irrational, Sullivan argues, so is future bias. Imagine, she writes, that you have trained for a triathlon for many months. Now it’s race day. The weather is fine, you’re healthy, but you just don’t feel like participating. Suppose you’re fairly certain that, if you don’t participate, you won’t regret your choice in the future. Should you race, even though you don’t feel like it?

Sullivan says that you should consider it. You might justify this choice in a future-oriented way: maybe, if you stay home, you’ll come to see yourself as the sort of person who works at plans and then abandons them, and this will discourage you from making more plans. But another consideration is that you have no reason to take your current goals more seriously than your past ones. “The mere fact that planning was done in the past is no reason to ignore it now,” Sullivan writes. Ignoring those plans reveals an irrational willingness to discount what’s happened in the past simply because it’s past. Why should we be biased against the past and in favor of the future?

Sullivan shares an example invented by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Suppose that you require surgery. It’s an unpleasant procedure, for which you need to be awake, in order to coöperate with the surgeon. Afterward, you will be given a drug that wipes out your memory of the experience. On the appointed day, you wake up in the hospital bed, confused, and ask the nurse about the surgery. She says that there are two patients in the ward—one who’s already had the operation, and another who’s soon to have it; she adds that, unusually, the operation that already happened took much longer than expected. She isn’t sure which patient you are, and has to go check. You would be greatly relieved, Parfit says, if the nurse comes back and tells you that you already had the operation. That is, you would willingly consign to your past self a long and agonizing procedure to avoid a much shorter procedure to come.

There is an evolutionary logic behind this kind of bias. As Caspar Hare, a philosopher at M.I.T., puts it, “It is not an accident that we are future-biased with respect to pain. That feature of ourselves has been selected-for by evolution.” In general, Hare writes, it seems likely that animals that focussed their attention on the future survived longer and reproduced more. “And a cognitively efficient way to focus a creature’s practical attention on the future is to have the creature care a great deal about its future pains and not at all about its past pains—a pattern of concern that quite naturally yields a preference for pain being past rather than future.”

In modern life, however, our future bias can have perverse consequences. Consider a study by the psychologist Eugene Caruso and his colleagues. The researchers asked people to imagine that they had agreed to spend five hours entering data into a computer, and then to say how much money they thought they should have been paid for the work. When their subjects imagined having done the data entry a month ago, they asked for an average of sixty-two dollars. But, if they imagined doing it a month in the future, they wanted an average of a hundred and twenty-five. In another study, Caruso and colleagues had participants read two versions of a story about a woman who had been seriously injured by a drunken driver. In one version, the accident had happened six months ago; in the other, it had happened just now. Holding everything else constant, people awarded the woman far more in damages when her injury was more recent.

These are not small effects, and, as the psychologists note, they have practical relevance. “Accident victims may be wise to seek compensation before they recover from their injuries,” they write. Similarly, “employees may be wise to establish the value of exceeding their performance goals before they do so.” Negotiate your bonus before you do something of value to your organization; after it’s over, future-biased people will value it less.

Just as with near bias, we more easily overcome future bias when we think about people other than ourselves. Hare gives his own twist to the Parfit thought experiment, asking you to suppose that you wake up, groggy, unsure whether you had a painful dental operation yesterday or are scheduled to have a somewhat less painful operation that afternoon. You would probably prefer that the operation was over and done with, opting for greater pain in the past over less pain in the future. But now, he writes, suppose that it isn’t you who’s faced with these alternatives, but your daughter, and she is far away, at a distant monastic retreat, and you won’t have contact with her for another two months. Would you rather that she had a more painful operation yesterday or a less painful operation later today? For Hare, and for me as well, the future bias disappears.

It’s striking to think that the past has weight not just because it influences the future but because it has its own intrinsic value. In his book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl describes making a speech at a concentration camp when things were at a low ebb. The prisoners were being punished through starvation, and Frankl worried that some would kill themselves. He talked to them about the present (it could be worse), and about the future (it could be better), but then considered life in retrospect:

I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. . . . Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

It’s possible to take a position that’s more radically time-neutral than Sullivan’s. She is what philosophers call an “endurantist”; she assumes that an individual’s life extends through time—with a past, a present, and a future. This might seem too obvious to mention, but it’s not universally accepted. Parfit was one of many philosophers who argued that enduring personal identity is a myth. We see ourselves as singular selves moving through time and space, he argued, but this is an illusion; instead, each person is best understood as a series of distinct individuals, overlapping and interconnected in various physical and psychological ways. As Larissa MacFarquhar wrote, in her Profile of Parfit for this magazine, Parfit himself found this view freeing. By seeing his future self as someone else, he said, he became “less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”

Such a rejection of personal identity is often described as fanciful; the philosopher Emily Thomas has cited it as an example of “wildly implausible metaphysics.” But there is some evidence from psychology and neuroscience that we do, in fact, think of our far-future selves as different people. Studies have found that, when we imagine an event in the near future, we tend to see it from a first-person perspective; imagining an event in the far future, we tend to see it in the third person. When making decisions about life right now, we often apply different standards to ourselves than to other people—but, when we make decisions about our future selves, we use the same standards. Thinking about our future selves has even been shown to resemble third-person thinking at the neural level. Both elicit a pattern of brain activation that is different from the one created when we think about ourselves in the present.

To me, Parfit’s view feels unnatural; if I were to learn that I had a terminal disease and would die painfully in a few years’ time, my reaction to the news would be qualitatively different from the one I’d have after hearing the same about someone else, even a loved one. Sullivan, for her part, notes that some of the ways in which we see ourselves—as parents, say, or athletes—imply that we are beings who are extended in time. It’s difficult to make sense of long-term relationships and projects if a person is really several loosely connected individuals spread through time. Still, we’ve seen that certain gut feelings about the relevance of time—now versus later, past versus future—might not survive reflection. Perhaps we will have to jettison our commonsense notion of personal identity as well.

In 1992, Parfit teamed up with the economist Tyler Cowen to argue, in a book chapter, that our governments are too eager to discount the fortunes of future people. Parfit and Cowen proposed that even a small bias in favor of the present over the future could have huge consequences over time. Suppose that a politician reasons that one life now is equal to 1.01 lives a year from now, and so embraces policies that favor a hundred people now over a hundred people next year. This hardly seems to matter—but this “discount rate” of one per cent per year implies that we would rather save a single life now, at the cost of a million lives in about fourteen hundred years. At a ten-per-cent discount rate, one life now would be worth a million in a mere century and half. Although no one in power thinks in exactly these terms, many of our decisions favor the present over the future.

In a 2018 book, “Stubborn Attachments,” Cowen expands on the idea, asking how we can fight near bias at a societal level and better further the interests of future people. There are “a variety of relevant values” that we might want to consider in our temporal rebalancing, he writes, “including human well-being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy,” and so on. Cowen concludes that the best way to maximize all of these things for the future is to increase economic growth. (He doesn’t go just by G.D.P.—he adds in various measures of “leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities.”)

The thing about economic growth, Cowen tells us, is that it has the potential to advance just about everything that people value. “Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun,” he writes. He concedes that, in recent decades, inequality has risen within wealthier nations, but also notes that, as a consequence of global economic growth, “recent world history has been an extraordinarily egalitarian time”: over all, countries are becoming more equal. In terms of happiness, Cowen shows that there is considerable evidence supporting the commonsense view that citizens of rich countries are happier than citizens of poor countries, and that, within rich countries, wealthier individuals are happier than poorer ones. The data actually understate the strength of the effect, Cowen writes, because many studies miss the happiness boost that comes from more years on the earth: “Researchers do not poll the dead.”

Cowen is sympathetic to the school of thought known as effective altruism, which holds that we should use data and research to figure out how to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But he worries that these sorts of altruists are too prone to think about the greatest good for people right now. An effective altruist might hold that, instead of spending money on some luxury for yourself, you should use it to help the poor. But, for Cowen, this sort of advice is too present-oriented. Even a small boost in the growth rate has enormous ramifications for years to come. “Our strongest obligations are to contribute to sustainable economic growth,” he writes, “and to support the general spread of civilization, rather than to engage in massive charitable redistribution in the narrower sense.” In general, Cowen thinks that policymakers should be more future-oriented. He suggests that we should put fewer resources into improving the lives of the elderly and devote correspondingly more resources to the young and the not-yet-born. Most politicians would balk at this suggestion, but, when they do the opposite—well, that’s a choice, too.

Cowen, to my mind, glosses over the problem of diminishing returns. Suppose that our prosperity increases a hundredfold. Life would be better, but would our happiness also increase by a multiple of a hundred? After a certain point, it might make sense to worry less about growth. Perhaps the most privileged of us are close to that point now. But these things can be hard to judge. The Babylonian kings might have thought that they were living the best possible lives, not realizing that, in the future, even everyday schmoes would be wiser and more pain-free, living longer, eating better, and travelling more.

Whether or not one agrees with Cowen’s thesis, there are clearly good reasons for adopting temporal neutrality on a societal level. It’s less clear that we have an obligation to be rigorously time-neutral as individuals. If we can indulge our own time biases without making horrible errors in judgment, why shouldn’t we? Why not distribute our pleasures and pains unevenly throughout our lives, if we believe that, for us, doing so will contribute to “life going forward as well as possible”? For many people, as Seneca wrote, “Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.” We undertake activities that we know to be difficult or unpleasant because we see them as part of a good life and wish to think back upon them in the future. We curate our presents to furnish our futures with the right kinds of pasts. If this benign bias encourages us to take on difficult things, isn’t it wise to indulge the bias?

Many people suspect that a good life might be one that’s ordered in a certain way. Psychologists find that people tend to prefer the idea of a wonderful life that ends abruptly to the idea of an equally wonderful one that includes some additional, mildly pleasant years—the “James Dean effect.” There’s also an appeal to starting with the worst and then seeing things improve. Andy Dufresne, the protagonist of the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” based on a novella by Stephen King, is convicted of double murder but maintains his innocence; he spends twenty-eight years in prison before stealing millions of dollars from his corrupt warden and escaping, then living out the rest of his life on a Mexican beach. It’s an exhilarating and powerful tale, but, if one flipped the order—coastal paradise, then brutal prison—it would be impossible to enjoy. Rags to riches beats riches to rags, even if the good and the bad are in precise balance. Maybe this is what Sullivan calls a structural bias—but, without structure, there’s no story, and stories are good things to have.

It’s true that time-biased thinking can mislead us. Imagine that you are listening to a symphony for a pleasurable ninety minutes—and then, at the end, someone’s cell phone goes off, to loud shushing and stifled laughter. You might say that these awful thirty seconds ruined the experience, even though the first ninety-nine per cent of it was wonderful, and think that, if the phone had rung at the start, it would have been less of a problem. But is a disruption in the finale really worse than an interruption in the overture? Sullivan’s arguments show that we should try reconsidering those kinds of intuitions—and that we should be wary, in general, of the strange places to which they can lead us. In a classic series of studies, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues exposed volunteers to two different experiences—sixty seconds of moderate pain, and sixty seconds of moderate pain followed by thirty seconds of mild pain. When they asked people which experience they would rather repeat, most chose the second experience, just because it ended better. There is little good to be said about choosing more over-all pain just because the experience ends on the right note.

And yet giving up all our time biases is a lot to ask. We are, it seems, constituted to favor the here and now, to radically discount the distant future, and to give special weight to how experiences end. We can move in the direction of temporal neutrality, fighting against certain time biases just as we resist our other unreasonable biases and preferences. This may make us more rational, more kind to others, and, at times, more happy.


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