Bryan Johnson argues we struggle to imagine unprecedented futures because we can only envision what we've already seen. Our biology prioritizes immediate concerns in seconds and minutes, making it hard to sustain interest in longer time horizons. This short-term bias kills our ability to practice delayed gratification and aspire toward genuinely novel possibilities.
We create goals and aspirations in life based upon things we can model out. We can see other people do it, and we then want to do it. It's very hard to model out something brand new that's never been done or never been experienced or never been talked about or doesn't have words to it. It's very hard to imagine those kinds of things. And so it's a problem of articulating this aspiration. It's a problem of getting people to also share in the aspiration. It's more of this emergent feeling that things could be better in unknown ways. And typically, when people get into that kind of thought process and they imagine what the future could be like, minds drift to dystopias in a fraction of a second. It's oftentimes challenging because the immediacy of human concerns is typically in the realm of seconds, then minutes, and then hours. But then once you get to days, the level of interest just kind of falls off a cliff in terms of what's immediately important to people. And that's just how we're biologically configured. It's how society is configured.
