Past-Me, Present-Me, Future-Me
👨🌾 → 🤪 → 👨🚀
A good way to think about concepts like hyperbolic discounting and sunk costs is to think in terms of past-me 👨🌾 and future-me 👨🚀.
Rather than think of yourself as a constant in the story you’re spinning in your head, split yourself into three people. It’s past-me 👨🌾 sending stuff forward to present-me 🤪, and present-me 🤪 sending stuff to future-me 👨🚀.
The great conveyor belt of time! 🛤
To me, that makes it easier to form the habit of thinking differently about the stuff I’m sending forward (as the current past-me 👨🌾 to future-me 👨🚀, if you follow).
If I think about things through the lens of present-me 🤪, it’s easy to overload future-me 👨🚀 because of hyperbolic discounting; you can’t imagine the pain of any task or commitment well when it’s far off in the distance of time.
But if you know that, on average, you make errors consistently in one direction, you may not be able to stop the errors from happening, but you may be able to figure out a mechanism to shift things by about the same amount in the opposite direction (assuming a 1D axis — it can be more complex than that).
So to calibrate for that discount, I like to adjust things by imagining that future-me 👨🚀 is busier than I am, and more reticent about things generally, so I have to be extra careful with what I sign him up for.
For sunk-costs, I feel it’s easier to let go and move on when you realize something was a mistake when you can chalk it up to a different person — past-me 👨🌾 — making a mistake. Present-me 🤪 isn’t tied by what this dumb character 👨🌾 did, and has to do the best that he can from his starting point in the present.
…
Speaking of past-me 👨🌾: Sometimes I feel like I’m coasting on what my past self did.
The books he read, the investments he made, the habits he took up, the relationships he built...
What have I done for myself lately? 🤔
Gotta step up my game and make future-me proud! 👨🚀
🧭 This first appeared in Edition 143 of Liberty’s Highlights. New here? I made a page for that: Start Here.