Your Daily Future
Change Your Direction. Navigate Your Future. Cultivate Your Life.
You can live the life and be the person you want. But to do so, you need to make some changes. We all do, but it isn’t easy. Whether it’s your health, fitness, or job—change is hard. The reason it’s so challenging is because change lives across time, one foot in the present and one in the future. Successfully making a change—going from the present to the future you want—is a journey. And like any journey, you need the right tools to navigate it.
Change is Hard
Choosing behaviors and building habits that lead to a healthy and vibrant life should be easy. Except… it’s not.
Anyone who’s tried to start exercising, eat more nutritiously, or drop a bad habit knows this. But why is it so hard? Doing what we know will be beneficial, that will make us feel better and be healthier, should not be difficult—these are things we want to do. You’d think we’d have this figured out by now. After all, you could fill a library with what’s been written on changing habits and billions are spent on ‘self-improvement’ every year.
With so much effort and expense poured into changing behavior, why isn’t it working? Why are so many stuck? The answer, I think, is time.
Future Value
The thing about making any lifestyle change, is that all the benefits are in the future. If the payoff were immediate, we wouldn’t have to change—we’d already be doing it! It’s nothing new to point out that people are bad at planning for the future. The only thing less original or less useful is complaining about the weather. What would be helpful, is a framework to make sense of this failing and provide tools to counter it.
Viewing things through the lens of time does both. The human brain is terrible at comparing benefits that occur across different time frames. Simply put, we value things more that are closer to now than those that are farther off. Even when the actual worth of something in the future is higher, we treat it as less valuable than something in the present. The upshot is that our perspective across time is largely responsible for how we make decisions and chose behaviors—but our near-term preference means this view is flawed. It isn’t a character defect. It’s just part of being human.
You might ask—so what? Well, for starters… This is wild! The most important decisions we make are driven by how we experience time. The choices that determine our health, how we look and feel, how vibrantly we live, our relationships, and how we perform in school and at work—all of it.
All our choices are impacted by this time bias. And it matters because we are time travelers.
Time Navigation
You heard me right—we’re time travelers. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at it. We can only go in one direction at one speed. We travel into the future, but because ‘future’ is just another way of saying the eventual present, we never really arrive. We’re constantly moving towards a new future, and every moment was once just one of an almost unlimited number of possibilities.
Though we can’t change our direction or rate of travel through time, we can make lateral moves. Our choices are those lateral moves, they steer us as we move into the future. It is through them that we navigate across time to determine which of our possible futures becomes our reality.
The problem, given our bias for the present, is we’re time travelling with the wrong map and a broken compass.
Navigation Tools
Most of our future-maps lack important details and the ‘X’ is in the wrong place, while our compasses point us in the wrong direction.
You deserve better tools to navigate your future, so you can cultivate the life you want. I’m using this newsletter to explore the science behind choices, habits and making changes across time.
My goal is to uncover systems and approaches we can all apply to fix our tools, so we can make the right moves and navigate time to the futures we want for ourselves.
TheTimeDoc?
That’s a weird thing for a guy to call himself. Let me explain. I’m an ER doctor, and in the ten-plus years that I’ve been practicing Emergency Medicine I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen to people. The sad and frustrating truth is that most of those bad things aren’t due to bad luck. They’re because of the choices people make over and over for years. Smoking, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, chemical abuse… You get the idea. That people make bad choices for themselves is generally taken as a given, not worth much thought. YourDailyFuture is the result of me stopping to ask—why?
-TheTimeDoc
