Future Error

In the last post Big Frank mentioned positive psychology and how empirical studies show that people are really not any good at predicting their future happiness. Dan Gilbert, in “Stumbling on Happiness” invokes what he calls the Reality First policy, which goes something like this: it is impossible to both focus on present reality and at the same time imagine something else. For example, look at a pine tree and then while looking at that tree try to imagine a maple tree – can’t be done. And another thing that can’t be done is for our brain to confuse an actual visual image with an imagined one. However, with emotion – it’s a whole different screening room. As Gilbert puts it, “The emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called feeling; the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called prefeeling; and mixing them up is one of the world’s most popular sports.”

It is also a similar confusion of emotions with imagining how we will feel in the future. We make the assumption that the feeling that we have when we imagine some future circumstance, event, or situation is actually what we will feel when we get there. This is usually as erroneous as the picture of the future you see above (retro-future at best). The reason is that what we feel when we imagine the future is most often a response to what is actually happening right now in the present. We mistakenly assume that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today. However, this rarely is the case. As he writes: “The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes. Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.”

The real irony of this is that the emotion that most people actually feel in this present moment is not really applicable to the future; but that presently felt emotion is often a reaction to an anticipation of future events. And, as Gilbert has shown, the future felt emotion rarely matches what we feel about it now. So, not only are those poor forecasters making false predictions, but they are poisoning their present situation as well. As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar:

O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child,
Why dost thou throw to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not?