I remember when I was around 11, learning the piano. My mother had arranged for classes after school, but I was not a good student. I would walk slowly up the road, arrive 10 minutes late to an elderly teacher who had a habit of shutting her eyes during my lessons – more in disgust than reverie (though possibly just old age). After some time, I told my mother that I would be giving up the lessons. You’ll regret it when you are older and wish you could play, she warned me; and I was sensible enough not to disagree. Yes, I expect I shall, I said, but I won’t next week after school on Wednesday. The lessons ended, and of course my mother was right.
I expect many of us have been through similar experiences, on both sides. Fancy another drink, knowing you’ll regret it tomorrow? Just another episode on Netflix? Neglect that run, again, to lie in bed another hour? We’ve all done it.
According to some views, this is an irrational failure; philosopher Derek Parfitt seemed to think so when he wrote we might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination. And that might sound right – after all, our future self is just us, in a few hours or years, so it makes no sense to shortchange that person who we will shortly be. But it turns out, perhaps, to be more a problem of empathy. Neurological studies seem to indicate that we do not think of our future selves in the same way as we think of ourselves. In fact, when we think of our future selves we literally use the same parts of our brain as when we think of strangers.
The implications of this are stark. As a parent and a teacher, it might mean that appeals to my children and students about the future are unlikely to be effective (that’s actually not news; extrinsic motivation like this is well known to be less effective than intrinsic motivation). We need to find alternative ways to appeal to the present.
This problem is really one of attention. From friends and family to teachers in class, to social media giants, to emails, to advertisers, to hobbies, there are many calls for our attention; often right in our faces, insistent, and hard to ignore. But they are, as we know, often distractions and film-maker Wim Wenders wrote about the monopoly of the visible which wrongly dominates our attention; and it’s interesting to see that the existential threat of our time – climate change – has largely arisen because it is so hard to pay attention to things that are decades away – even when they will dramatically affect our future selves. Alas the decades have passed and things are now far more urgent and dangerous than they would have been, had we paid proper attention and not disregarded the evidence thirty years ago.
The job of leadership is often to direct attention to the less visible. For me, the emotive approach of attending to the type of world we would want to leave for our children turns out to also be the most rational approach. It aligns with human nature, and the act of ‘seeing the big picture, ‘playing the long game’ or ‘taking the balcony view’ (as it is called in different leadership approaches) has a venerable history. 18th century philosopher and economist Edmund Burke described society as a partnership… not only between those living but [also] between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born; Teddy Roosevelt spoke of the present-day minority of humanity. Environmental lawyer Edith Weiss in her book In Fairness to Future Generations recommended that the United Nations designate a High Commissioner for Future Generations. Written in modern, systems-speak language, it means that our ecosystem of care should extend not only across space to other nations, not only across differences to a wide variety of people, but also across time.
But alas, that argument, however strongly felt by those of us with children, is hardly compelling if we’re caught up in the present and the visible, unable to see the invisible – for the unborn are surely that.
There’s no easy answer here; if there were, then we’d likely have taken it already; there are only hard choices ahead. Maybe it’s a case of just the willpower to abstain – but my 11 year old piano-playing self was fully, if unwittingly aligned with English economist Nassau William Senior, who said to abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will. We should not count on it.
The way forward here has to be an approach that sets in place the conditions for us to make a tight link between the present and future. It has to involve avoiding a narrow, individualist mindset that ultimately views the world as an economic resource; as a means to an end. It means we need to bring our kids, our students, to places of natural beauty and wonder, and to help them understand systems and science well enough to want to act now, not out of some sense of deferred gratification, or through gritted teeth, but out of genuine sense of connection and appreciation. It also means developing a deep sense of empathy that goes beyond the people who are in front of us here, today. In practice, these forms of thinking, these habits of leisure need to form a thread across childhood – at school and at home – if they are to inform the way of being that we need for a sustainable future. It’s all our work.
