“TO ABSTAIN FROM ENJOYMENT WHICH IS IN OUR POWER, OR TO SEEK DISTANT RATHER THAN IMMEDIATE RESULTS, ARE AMONG THE MOST PAINFUL EXERTIONS OF THE HUMAN WILL” –
NASSAU WILLIAM SENIOR
I don't know about you, but I have always been a procrastinator. In high school I would always wait and do my homework in between periods or in the hallways right before school. In college my finals weeks were sleepless blurs of paper after paper after project. When I got older I found myself in awe of people who were 26 and had already started saving a sizable amount for their future. These things are fairly relatable. I know a lot of people who have experienced this in one form or another, and I never really thought much about it. "I'm just a procrastinator" I would think, "I'll just have to learn to make it work for me." It wasn't until later that I heard a TED Talk that really changed the way I thought about this.
It may have to do with a disconnect from “your future self.” The disconnect comes from this unconscious belief that the person you are today is a separate entity from the person you are in the future. The future you wants to retire at 55, but today you wants to take a trip to Hawaii. The future you should be a successful CEO, but the present you doesn’t want to work past 5:00. We have these notions on how we want the future to be, and a lot of times we are incapable of reconciling our present actions with our future wants. This is why you can say over and over that you want to learn Karate and absolutely see yourself kicking ass in a year, but one year later you're still struggling to break a stick in half.
Keith Chen , an economics professor at UCLA, proposes a rather interesting idea. As a native English-speaking Chinese person he often wondered at the differences between the two languages, and in particular the difference in their future tenses. Upon doing a some further research, he realized that this difference in tenses was visible across the board in many languages. Where in English one say “it will rain tomorrow” in German one would say “Morgen regnet es” which translates literally to “It rains tomorrow.” This way requires that English speakers make an inherent distinction between the present and the future, in a way that German does not. This leads us to distinguish the two by saying that English has a strong future-tense while German has a weak-future tense, and it is possible that this discrepancy could be influencing how we connect our present to future selves.
This may seem a little far fetched but the effects of language on perception are well known. Keith takes this idea and applies it to economics. He believes that the separation of present-self from future-self affects us not only on a personal scale, but influences the amount of money that whole countries save. Not only does this apply to savings, it correlates to the amount of risk that citizens take in their daily lives. For example, those countries with a stronger future tense are statistically more likely to engage in impulse buying, smoking and engaging in unprotected sex.
For me, just knowing about this helps me to try and combat it. Since learning about this I have started a 401K (I'M AN ADULT), gotten my lazy butt to start running and exercising and have actually taken some classes to learn martial arts (okay like one month's worth but it's something)
Originally appeared on ICOSAMedia.com here