One of the other older guys in my weekly tai chi class always answers my “How are you?” greeting with “Living the dream…!” There’s some whimsy in his response, and maybe some truth, too. As it turns out, though, “Living the dream” may also be more difficult than just describing a good life.
In the opening episode of the PBS documentary series, “A Brief History of the Future”, UCLA social neuroscientist Dr. Hal Hershfield recounts experimental evidence that our brains may be hardwired not to think about our future selves in an intimate, personal way. His correlated hypothesis: We may think that—and behave as though—the consequences of our decisions befall (what our brains perceive as) some other person. A stranger.
Where that leads me: Is it possible that we have trouble imagining our future selves, and therefore that “the dream” may not be there to live out? To say that another way: If our neurobiology enmeshes us in only present-tense thinking about ourselves, how can we frame a useful/actionable picture of the future we hope to achieve when we’re older?
In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, science writer Stephen S. Hall thinks of this skill as “loving our future selves,” for him an essential ingredient to lasting and useful wisdom. His logic is simple: If we can’t imagine—and hold dear—our future selves, we’ll be prone to decision-making that prioritizes only the immediate gratification of short-term rewards.
We’re spiritually minded folks, so there’s hope here: Grounding our lives in something more than our own well-being—our own dreams—we can more readily recognize and understand others. We can frame our own histories as part of God’s purposeful actions in time, and commit ourselves to caring for “strangers” wherever we encounter them.
Including our future selves….
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