The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds—about as long as it takes, the psychologist Marc Wittmann points out, for Paul McCartney to sing the words “Hey Jude.” Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window. Practitioners of mindfulness meditation often strive to rest their consciousness within it. The rest of us might encounter something similar during certain present-tense moments—perhaps while rock climbing, improvising music, making love. Being in the moment is said to be a perk of sadomasochism; as a devotee of B.D.S.M. once explained, “A whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can’t look away from it, and they can’t think about anything else!”
In 1971, the book “Be Here Now,” by the spiritual leader Ram Dass, helped introduce yoga to the West. Much of the time, we are elsewhere. In 2010, the psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a study in which they used an iPhone app to ask volunteers, at random points throughout the day, what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how happy they were. The researchers found that, in about half of their samples, people’s minds were wandering, often remembering the past or contemplating the future. These periods were, on average, less pleasant than ones spent being in the moment. Thoughts of the future are often associated with anxiety and dread, and thoughts of the past can be colored by regret, embarrassment, and shame.
Still, mental time travel is essential. In one of Aesop’s fables, ants chastise a grasshopper for not collecting food for the winter; the grasshopper, who lives in the moment, admits, “I was so busy singing that I hadn’t the time.” It’s important to find a proper balance between being in the moment and stepping out of it. We all know people who live too much in the past or worry too much about the future. At the end of their lives, people often regret most their failures to act, stemming from unrealistic worries about consequences. Others, indifferent to the future or disdainful of the past, become unwise risk-takers or jerks. Any functioning person has to live, to some extent, out of the moment. We might also think that it’s right for our consciousnesses to shift to other times—such inner mobility is part of a rich and meaningful life.
On a group level, too, we struggle to strike a balance. It’s a common complaint that, as societies, we are too fixated on the present and the immediate future. In 2019, in a speech to the United Nations about climate change, the young activist Greta Thunberg inveighed against the inaction of policymakers: “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” she said. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you.” But, if their inaction is a betrayal, it’s most likely not a malicious one; it’s just that our current pleasures and predicaments are much more salient in our minds than the fates of our descendants. And there are also those who worry that we are too future-biased. A typical reaction to long-range programs, such as John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program or Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is that the money would be better spent on those who need it right now. Others complain that we are too focussed on the past, or with the sentimental reconstruction of it. Past, present, future; history, this year, the decades to come. How should we balance them in our minds?
Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, contemplates these questions in her book “Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.” Sullivan is mainly concerned with how we relate to time as individuals, and she thinks that many of us do it poorly, because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should happen. Maybe you have a “near bias”: you eat the popcorn as the movie is about to start, even though you would probably enjoy it more if you waited. Maybe you have a “future bias”: you are upset about an unpleasant task that you have to do tomorrow, even though you’re hardly bothered by the memory of performing an equally unpleasant task yesterday. Or maybe you have a “structural bias,” preferring your experiences to have a certain temporal shape: you plan your vacation such that the best part comes at the end.
For Sullivan, all of these time biases are mistakes. She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives the past, the present, and the future equal weight. She arrives at her arguments for temporal neutrality by outlining several principles of rational decision-making. According to the principle of success, Sullivan writes, a rational person prefers that “her life going forward go as well as possible”; according to the principle of non-arbitrariness, a rational person’s preferences “are insensitive to arbitrary differences.” A commitment to being rational, Sullivan argues, will make us more time-neutral, and temporal neutrality will help us think better about everyday problems, such as how best to care for elderly parents and save for retirement.
Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future. There are occasions when this kind of near bias can be rational: if someone offers you the choice between a gift of a thousand dollars today and a year from now, you’d be justified in taking the money now, for any number of reasons. (You can put it in the bank and get interest; there’s a chance you could die in the next year; the gift giver could change her mind.) Still, it’s more often the case that, as economists say, we too steeply “discount” the value of what’s to come. This near bias pulls at us in our everyday decisions. We tend to be cool and rational when planning for the far-off future, but we lose control when temptations grow nearer in time. In an essay called “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command,” from 1980, the economist Thomas C. Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, described the supposedly rational consumer as someone who actually “sits glued to the TV knowing that again tomorrow he’ll wake early in a cold sweat unprepared for that morning meeting on which so much of his career depends.”
We struggle to defeat this near bias—to be like Ulysses, who had his sailors tie him to the mast so that he could hear the song of the Sirens without following them into the sea. Dieters buy food in small portions. Heavy drinkers hand their car keys to their friends. My younger son once had an alarm clock that ran away as it went off. You can try negotiating with yourself: I’ll eat what I want but it has to be keto; I’ll eat what I want but only between noon and 8 P.M.; I’ll eat what I want but only on a cheat day. I can go on Twitter, but first I have to work on this article for thirty more minutes.
If near bias is irrational, Sullivan argues, so is future bias. Imagine, she writes, that you have trained for a triathlon for many months. Now it’s race day. The weather is fine, you’re healthy, but you just don’t feel like participating. Suppose you’re fairly certain that, if you don’t participate, you won’t regret your choice in the future. Should you race, even though you don’t feel like it?
Sullivan says that you should consider it. You might justify this choice in a future-oriented way: maybe, if you stay home, you’ll come to see yourself as the sort of person who works at plans and then abandons them, and this will discourage you from making more plans. But another consideration is that you have no reason to take your current goals more seriously than your past ones. “The mere fact that planning was done in the past is no reason to ignore it now,” Sullivan writes. Ignoring those plans reveals an irrational willingness to discount what’s happened in the past simply because it’s past. Why should we be biased against the past and in favor of the future?
Sullivan shares an example invented by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Suppose that you require surgery. It’s an unpleasant procedure, for which you need to be awake, in order to coöperate with the surgeon. Afterward, you will be given a drug that wipes out your memory of the experience. On the appointed day, you wake up in the hospital bed, confused, and ask the nurse about the surgery. She says that there are two patients in the ward—one who’s already had the operation, and another who’s soon to have it; she adds that, unusually, the operation that already happened took much longer than expected. She isn’t sure which patient you are, and has to go check. You would be greatly relieved, Parfit says, if the nurse comes back and tells you that you already had the operation. That is, you would willingly consign to your past self a long and agonizing procedure to avoid a much shorter procedure to come.
There is an evolutionary logic behind this kind of bias. As Caspar Hare, a philosopher at M.I.T., puts it, “It is not an accident that we are future-biased with respect to pain. That feature of ourselves has been selected-for by evolution.” In general, Hare writes, it seems likely that animals that focussed their attention on the future survived longer and reproduced more. “And a cognitively efficient way to focus a creature’s practical attention on the future is to have the creature care a great deal about its future pains and not at all about its past pains—a pattern of concern that quite naturally yields a preference for pain being past rather than future.”
In modern life, however, our future bias can have perverse consequences. Consider a study by the psychologist Eugene Caruso and his colleagues. The researchers asked people to imagine that they had agreed to spend five hours entering data into a computer, and then to say how much money they thought they should have been paid for the work. When their subjects imagined having done the data entry a month ago, they asked for an average of sixty-two dollars. But, if they imagined doing it a month in the future, they wanted an average of a hundred and twenty-five. In another study, Caruso and colleagues had participants read two versions of a story about a woman who had been seriously injured by a drunken driver. In one version, the accident had happened six months ago; in the other, it had happened just now. Holding everything else constant, people awarded the woman far more in damages when her injury was more recent.
These are not small effects, and, as the psychologists note, they have practical relevance. “Accident victims may be wise to seek compensation before they recover from their injuries,” they write. Similarly, “employees may be wise to establish the value of exceeding their performance goals before they do so.” Negotiate your bonus before you do something of value to your organization; after it’s over, future-biased people will value it less.
Just as with near bias, we more easily overcome future bias when we think about people other than ourselves. Hare gives his own twist to the Parfit thought experiment, asking you to suppose that you wake up, groggy, unsure whether you had a painful dental operation yesterday or are scheduled to have a somewhat less painful operation that afternoon. You would probably prefer that the operation was over and done with, opting for greater pain in the past over less pain in the future. But now, he writes, suppose that it isn’t you who’s faced with these alternatives, but your daughter, and she is far away, at a distant monastic retreat, and you won’t have contact with her for another two months. Would you rather that she had a more painful operation yesterday or a less painful operation later today? For Hare, and for me as well, the future bias disappears.