How much should we value the past, the present, and the future?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s possible to take a position that’s more radically time-neutral than Sullivan’s. She is what philosophers call an “endurantist”; she assumes that an individual’s life extends through time—with a past, a present, and a future. This might seem too obvious to mention, but it’s not universally accepted. Parfit was one of many philosophers who argued that enduring personal identity is a myth.
The thing about economic growth, Cowen tells us, is that it has the potential to advance just about everything that people value. “Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun,” he writes.
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