Daniel Pink examines why living only in the present backfires. Languages that blur the future tense, like Mandarin, correlate with better retirement savings and healthier choices. When people see an aged version of their own face, they dramatically increase retirement contributions, suggesting that connecting with your future self changes how you decide today.
This is incredible research from Keith Chen at UCLA. So what he looked at was your native language, the language you speak. And so some languages have a sharp distinction between present and future. English is one of those. I will go to the store at 2 o'clock. You don't say, I go to the store at 2 o'clock. You say, I'm at the store, I'm going to the store now, or I will go to the store at 2 o'clock. But other languages have a fuzzier division between present and future. Mandarin would be one. What Chen found, and this is pretty amazing, is that people whose native languages have a strong divide between present and future, less likely to save for retirement, more likely to smoke, less likely to practice safe sex. It seems totally, okay, what? All right? But Keith Chen is a very serious researcher, and so he starts looking at it, and so even, so it must be cultural, blah blah blah blah blah. So you look at a place like Switzerland where people speak 2 different languages, one with a hard distinction, one with a soft distinction, and lo and behold, ones with a hard distinction, less safe behavior. And the theory is, and I'll give you one more study to pay it off, is that at some level we think of our current selves and our future selves as different people altogether. And when you start thinking it as the same, you end up behaving better. I'll give you one really glorious— this is a gorgeous piece of research from Hal Hirschfield at UCLA. I wrote about this in To Sell Is Human too. So think about this. People don't save for retirement. So you come in, your company offers a 401, and you say, oh, no thanks. You're offering me free money? No thanks. You're offering— you're making me save a little bit in order to get some free money later on? No thank you. It's completely irrational, right? So Howe's theory was that people were thinking of themselves differently. They were thinking of future Rohan. Rohan today is thinking of Rohan in the future as an entirely different person. So what he did is he used this software that can age advance your face. For reals? Yeah. And so what he does is put Rohan in there and say, you want to put some money in your 401? Rohan today says no. Then we take Rohan's clone and we show Rohan's clone before we ask him that question. Hey Rohan, here's here's what you're going to look like when you're 80. And Rohan looks at old Rohan and he's like, holy smokes, I'm totally putting money away for that guy. It's beautiful research. Hal Hirschfield at UCLA. And so the point of all of this is that I think that what we're looking for as human beings is that integration between past me, current me, and future me, rather than this thing that's purely about being in the present. And you see this in a lot of— this is not, again, it's not philosophical on my part. This is my reading of the research. Look at things like Research on awe, the incredible emotion of awe. Look at the research on nostalgia. You look at some of the savings behavior and so forth, and it seems like sort of the highest expression of ourselves is to integrate the past, present, and future rather than be purely present.
