Our Imagination is Tethered to the Past
We are not so good at imagining the possible. It's a problem. But also solutions.
As anyone who has faced the prospect of cleaning out a closet knows, it’s hard to get rid of things.
Why?
Because you remember how much you used to wear that old sweater with the rip in the elbow and the odd yellow stain on the cuff all the time. It was your favorite! You even wore it when you went to pick up your puppy (who’s now 13) from the pound! Awww.
And yet, you haven’t worn in 12 years and it’s kind of gross.
Of course, the moment you actually decide to clean your closet for real, and you ditch or donate all those items, you miss none of them. Not even the puppy sweater. A few minutes after they leave your garage in the back of a pickup, you are no longer their owner. You are now the owner of a clean and spacious closet. But a few minutes ago, you couldn’t imagine valuing the spaciousness as much as you valued the sweater. You had very little idea how you would feel a few minutes into the future when presented with an amazing-looking closet.
Let’s say it’s Friday at 4.45pm and you skipped lunch, and you have to get to the store before you get home this evening. You are starving. You walk into the store and think, I know - I will make big vegetable pot pie, with mashed potatoes and gravy, and I need apple pie for dessert, with ice cream!
You get home, you snack on the chips and hummus, and cheese and crackers you bought because you need to eat something right away while you make your pot pie! The pie looks amazing, you made a huge bowl of mashed potatoes, and when you sit down, you eat a small amount of pot pie and potatoes. Too full from the chips! And you cannot possibly think about apple pie right now. So much pastry! What was I thinking?
Our hungry self in the store cannot possibly imagine being full. Our full self after dinner cannot possibly imagine what we were thinking in the store.
We have a problem.
It turns out that the way we feel now, has a much stronger influence on how we think we’ll feel a bit later than we usually realize. So when we make decisions about the future (buy the apple pie for dessert!), we tend to think that we will feel much the same as we do now (so hungry!) We forget that in the intervening time, we will have had snacks and a pot pie and potatoes and might not feel the same as we do now about something else wrapped in pastry.
This turns out to be a problem not just related to dinner and closets.
We have a bias towards believing things we consider ‘facts’ as opposed to believing wants or wishes or potential feelings.
‘I am hungry right this second’, is a more credible piece of information than ‘I might not be as hungry later after I have consumed an entire tub of hummus’, and we act accordingly by buying unnecessary slabs of apple-filled desserts.
When I moved to the USA at aged 21, my graduate advisor - an expat Brit himself - said, by way of a small warning, “Moving to the US will change your perspective”. At the time, I agreed wholeheartedly that he was probably right, but I didn’t even remotely understand what he really meant, and how a changed perspective would really feel or manifest.
Of course, it did change the way I viewed….well, virtually everything. My home country, my job prospects, my approach to academia and education, the kind of people I associated with, politics, cuisine, language….literally everything. (Except peanut butter….I still absolutely can’t stand peanut butter. Sorry America).
Had I known how much my views would change, and that I would ultimately decide to stay and become an American citizen, would I have still decided to come to the US? I’m not sure. I think I would have imagined that losing my previous perspectives and attachment to the UK would indeed have felt like a loss, rather than imagining how the gain in other perspectives and other attachments would have shaped my future for the better (at least that’s my view at this point!)
And that’s really the point with all these examples. We can’t imagine the possible nearly as well as we can compare with the present or the past.
And this makes total sense. The past is definitive. It has already happened and we know how we feel about it (well sort of anyway - it turns out we rewrite that too, but that’s for another day). The possible - the future - hasn’t happened and is by definition uncertain. So instead of letting our imaginations dive into that uncertainty, we instead cleave to what we know and assume that the future will be very much like the present with a small twist.
This seems critical to me, and more than any policy or politician we might support, or any science or solution we might consider, we need to understand how our mind works so that we understand how often we fail to create a future - a next chapter - that we might otherwise really prefer. We can’t even articulate what it is that we would prefer, because we’re really quite terrible at imagining how different versions of a future would make us feel.
So, what to do….
Well, it turns out that the very best solution, which hardly any of us accept, let alone do, is to use other people’s experiences of something we imagine might be better (or worse), as a surrogate for how we would actually feel.
Yes, yes, we are all unique and how you will feel after accepting a new job as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal will be completely different to some other random dude who has already made the shift to the WSJ feels.
Except that it’s not. Different I mean. According to Dan Gilbert and the research he cites, it is much more likely that a person currently in the same circumstance that you are considering is a much better predictor of how you will feel than your own judgements about how you will feel.
So, instead of asking ourselves…..how would we feel if we had universal healthcare but much higher taxes (Terrible! We’re American - taxes should be low!), we should ask some Swedes what they think about that. (Top of the global happiness report! Our 50% taxes pays for free education, healthcare, childcare, paid family leave etc etc. We have much less to worry about).
Instead of asking ourselves how we would feel if we were not allowed to purchase an automatic or semi-automatic weapon (how dare my second amendment rights be curtailed!), we could ask people in countries where they have been banned (‘we’re glad for the bad guys not to have access to automatic weapons anymore, and glad that while we can still have shotguns, that they are tightly regulated’ - people in Britain).
Instead of imagining how it might be if we lived in an autocracy, we might consider how the protesters in China and Iran feel at the moment.
Instead of asking how we would feel to be ‘limited’ to clean energy and to reject the idea of accumulation for its own sake, perhaps we should ask Uruguayans who produce 98% of their energy from clean sources and have low poverty, universal healthcare, almost perfect literacy, and people who are contented to live in relative simplicity.
I admit that this all feels very uncomfortable. And the examples I chose might seem like ‘liberal’ policies. But I think it’s possible that we overestimate how bad we would feel about ‘losing something’ (taxable income, AR15s, unlimited coal-based energy), and don’t fully understand what a safer, socially caring, cleaner society might feel like. It’s an argument I’d like to explore anyway…
Confronting our human limitations of imagination, and trusting that others who are already experiencing something different, know better how we might feel, might just be the secret to making better individual, national, and global decisions….
I would love your thoughts on this!
Hmmm - strikes me as a variation on the idea that we are always more comfy with the devil that we know.... and how that bias towards the familiar holds us back in so many ways. We resist the unknown that we can’t imagine, like ending unhealthy relationships, adopting better habits, or taking action on that scary but persistent dream we’ve long held.
But as I always tell my clients, good things happen on the other side of terrified. :-)