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We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.
To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine–ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be.
What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future.
The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.
We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain–not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.
In other words, people can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.
What we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view–from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience.
people can be wrong about what they are feeling.
We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what it is good for, and if we examine all the many objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: by and large, they are good for making us feel happy.
When Kant wrote that ‘perception without conception is blind’,28 he was suggesting that without the filling-in trick we would have nothing even remotely resembling the subjective experience that all of us take for granted.
As we are about to see, when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed–and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.
Our inability to think about absences can lead us to make some fairly bizarre judgments.
Holmes confided in Watson: “See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.”
We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.
The bottom line is this: the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
Our ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen enables us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without taking them.
