In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman discusses our finitude and the idea that we have to make trade-offs in life. What I was a little disappointed in was that Burkeman doesn’t talk about how we are supposed to make those trade-offs. In particular, Burkeman argues that we live in the future too much, and should instead live more in the present. That’s all well and good, but there are also benefits to living for the future that Burkeman doesn’t really address. He hedges his bets, saying that of course we should also keep the future in mind and plan beyond today. So how do we work out where that balance is?
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How much you should live in the future depends on your age
How much weight you give to the present or the future is ultimately a personal preference. So there can’t be any hard and fast rules for it. However, I think age is very relevant. Living for the future makes a lot more sense when you are young, for two reasons:
- First, your future is expected to be longer; and
- Second, the investments you make might compound.
Longer expected future
When you’re young, your investments can pay off over a much longer timeframe. I’m not just talking about financial investments. We also make investments in skills, relationships, health, good habits, and pleasant memories.1I would highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s TED Talk on “The Riddle of Memory vs Experience” if you haven’t seen it. When I first viewed it, I was like, “Mind. BLOWN.”
The trade-off between our experiencing and remembering selves mirrors this trade-off between living in the present (experience) and living in the future (memory). Memory is a recollection of the past, so when you seek to produce a good memory, that is an investment. You are living for your future remembering self.
However, memory and experience are not completely separate things. A trip can be enjoyable both in the moment, and on reflection. Basically anything valuable. For example, if you learn to cook when you are 18, you’ll likely have 60+ years to enjoy that skill. The same cannot be said for learning to cook when you are 80.
Even learning about yourself is an “investment”, as it provides information you can use for the rest of your life. A well-known problem in computer science is the exploration-exploitation trade-off. One factor in deciding where that trade-off lies is how long you’ll be able to “exploit” something you’ve found. (While the word “exploit” has pejorative connotations in everyday usage, it’s value-neutral here. If you prefer, mentally substitute in “use” instead.) If your time horizon is finite, you should front-load your exploration because, among other reasons, the value of a new discovery goes down over time.
For example, say you spend a year in Spain. Finding an amazing restaurant in your first week there has a much higher value than finding it in your last week.2This Spain example is from an 80,000 Hours interview with Brian Christian.
Similarly, as your life is finite, you should front-load your exploration. It’s perfectly rational for young people to explore new things, try different jobs, and travel to various places. During that exploration, they can learn valuable things about themselves – what they like or dislike, what they’re good or bad at – and they’ll have many decades to use that knowledge. If you learn early on that you love swimming, you can reap the benefits of that for many years. When you’re 80, however, it’s rational not to be too experimental. Even if you learn something new at that age, you’ll have less time to exploit that knowledge.
Compounding investments
The fact that investments can compound is related to the above point but is slightly different. It provides a further reason why investing early pays off even more than you might think.
The effect of compounding is most obvious in financial investments – the magic of compounding interest is well-understood. But I think other things can compound too. Take my example of a cooking skill. Being able to cook well doesn’t just provide you with good food for life. It also has other benefits, such as financial, physical and mental health benefits, which may themselves compound.
Compounding might also be seen in education and careers, though I’m less sure about this. Kids who do well early on seem to have a better chance of getting into a good school, which gives them a better chance of getting into a good college, which then gives a better chance at landing a good job. None of this is guaranteed and there will always be exception, but there does appear to be a trend.
(Note, however that David Epstein in Range has evidence to suggest that an early “head start” is less important than we often think. Kids who specialise early do tend to have a head start but, over time, that advantage evaporates and kids who instead did more exploratory sampling catch up and even overtake them. But I’m not sure this undermines my point that early investments can compound. The exploratory kids just “invested” differently than the specialising kids, and the returns on their investments had different distributions in terms of time and value.)
Back to Burkeman and Four Thousand Weeks
In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman talks extensively about parenting books, which focus exclusively on the future and the kinds of children and adults that the different parenting approaches would produce. He argues that treating childhood as merely a training ground for adulthood deprives it of any intrinsic value. I see Burkeman’s point but, for the reasons above, I think it makes sense when parents are deciding what to do, to focus mainly on the likely impact on their child’s future. Not exclusively, sure, but mainly.
In my main summary of the book, I wrote that, rather than over-weighting the future, most people seem to be myopic and over-weight the present. If that’s true, living for the future could be a competitive advantage. When the market is risk-averse on average, being risk-neutral can help you get ahead. Similarly, when the world is present-biased on average, taking a longer time horizon lets you outperform in the longer run. I’m sure that Burkeman’s success now is at least partly because he previously “lived for the future” and made investments in himself that are now paying off. I think the same is true for myself (Of course, luck also played a big role in getting me and Burkeman to where we are now.)
But there comes a point in life when it makes sense to shift from living more for the future to living more in the present. It seems like Burkeman, at 47 years old, has recently reached that point. Burkeman refers also to Kieran Setiya’s book, Midlife, which suggests we should engage in more atelic activities – things which are enjoyable in and of themselves, not because of their ultimate aim. Setiya is currently 46, almost 47.
We certainly shouldn’t just do what we’ve always done and keep living for the future, exclusively and mindlessly. We should shift that balance and weight it more towards the present as we get older. But perhaps those of us who haven’t reached midlife yet should still be living in the future more.
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What do you think about living in the future vs living in the present? Share your thoughts below!
- 1I would highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s TED Talk on “The Riddle of Memory vs Experience” if you haven’t seen it. When I first viewed it, I was like, “Mind. BLOWN.”
The trade-off between our experiencing and remembering selves mirrors this trade-off between living in the present (experience) and living in the future (memory). Memory is a recollection of the past, so when you seek to produce a good memory, that is an investment. You are living for your future remembering self.
However, memory and experience are not completely separate things. A trip can be enjoyable both in the moment, and on reflection. - 2This Spain example is from an 80,000 Hours interview with Brian Christian.
2 thoughts on “Living in the future vs the present”
I love the explore-exploit dichotomy that you highlighted and honestly wish it came to mind more often. I think it’s hard to rigorously apply in life, but the concept still provides a useful lens for personal decision-making, especially when time is an explicit constraint. And, as you allude to, it’s easy to spot if you look at how people of different ages make decisions (a college-aged student will have a large network of friends/acquaintances, while older people typically have only a few, but very meaningful friendships). Interesting thoughts!
Thanks Zak! Yeah, I find the explore-exploit trade-off very interesting too. I know Brian Christian talks about it in his book, “Algorithms to Live By”. It’s been on my reading list for ages, but I think I will move it up the queue!