Cross-Temporal Love
Respecting future-me as sovereign
I keep noticing ways in which I’m not a coherent continuous person. I’m starting to look at my identity as a succession of time-slices, each carrying its own distinct experiential flavor. I want my current selves to be more compassionate and respectful of my past and future selves, an ongoing chain of caring co-creation.
This vision is hampered by a lack of understanding and empathy. My various time-slices struggle to grasp what it’s like to be each other. They impose one-sided, careless expectations on future selves; failing to understand the severity of future consequences.
These effects of temporal discontinuity in self care seems all too common, with unequal exchanges including:
“Let’s drink!” / “Oh my god, I’m so hung over, why am I doing this to myself?”
“I can exercise tomorrow” / “Why didn’t I exercise yesterday?”
“The night is young!” / “God, I’m sleep deprived”
I’m sure you can recognize some of these patterns, my dear reader. Moving on, I want to share some examples where lack of cross-temporal care have bitten me in the ass.
1. Lack of Seasonal Collaboration
When I’m feeling well, I can’t relate to what it’s like when I’m feeling down. Summer-me is busy with his own stuff, procrastinating planning an early spring vacation.
Summer-me cares about winter-me in theory: but it’s hard to imagine what seasonal affective disorder feels like, when you have an abundance of daylight. This year, the spring-summer-autumn timeslices of myself kept passing the responsibility onward, ending up dumping the responsibility on February-me. February-me has a lot of skin-in-the-game, ending up putting limited energy reserves towards vacation planning. A sub-optimal distribution of labor.
I wish summer-me could put some of his abundant energy reserves to take care of winter-me, acting from a place of love to prevent future suffering. Alas, the temporal disconnect and the ensuing empathy problems ended up dumping the work on me, last minute.
2. Shredding Purposes Using a Todo-List
Another way in which collaboration fails between time-slices of myself is how I collapse around my todo-list.
I’ve been using GTD1, where I:
Continuously: Collect things to do
Weekly: Filter/Sort and Plan what to do when
Continuously: Execute
In theory, this is a great way to keep track of what to do, a helpful way to get organized and productive. In practice, my todo-list has become a purpose-shredder, removing meaning from my life.
When I collect things to do, the collector-timeslice of myself connected to the purpose of the task. During my weekly review,2 I often feel resistance to the tasks in my inbox. I see the effortfulness, but I’m often disconnected from the purpose. Once at the 3rd step, execution, all meaning has been successfully shredded, turning once purposeful actions into dull tasks to execute.
At this point, I rarely remember the original sense of purposefulness. I react to the situation by either procrastinating, or jumping onto a maniacal workaholic train: where I feel good about executing, without really being in tune with why I’m doing what I do.3
On some fundamental level, I’ve been treating my todo-list as a list of things I have commited to doing. Once I get to the execution step, I’ve treated inner resistance as failure. This way, I’ve been glorifying my collapse into execution, rather than seeing it as a problem.
Moving forward, I want to relate to my todo-list as a menu of things I could do, to be approached with discernment, rather than treated as an obligation.4
The Illusion of Self
Time-slice defection is pervasive! Smooth collaboration is possible,5 but far from given! Dealing with this is hampered by my tendency to view myself as a continuous being, who ought to treat future selves as mere extensions of my current self.
If I treat future selves as “the same” as my current self, then it makes sense for my current self to trade between current and future utility, with postponed costs still falling on the same entity.
If I view time-slices as distinct identities, postponed costs start looking like externalized costs, unilaterally imposed on someone not at the negotiation table.
The illusion of a continous self allows for this kind of temporal discrimination! By seeing myself as temporally whole, I ironically allow myself to treat future time-slices of myself as a means-to-an-end, contorting them to fit my current agenda. In this way, the illusion of temporal continousness allows for relating to future selves in ways that limit their ability to act from a place of wholeness.
When I postpone my vacation planning, I don’t fully care about the plight of my future self. When I expect my future self to execute my unilaterally decided-upon plans, I treat my future self as a slave-to-my-will, glorifying collapse into execution as a demonstration of integrity.
Moving Toward Wholeness
Wholeness is a difficult state to attain: I find myself collapsing into habitual patterns all the time. When I do, I go through the motions, executing learned patterns rather than engaging with the fullness of my capacity.
When I treat future time-slices of myself as less-than-whole, I make it harder for my future self to be fully present, and engage wholeheartedly. Going through the motions makes me miss many things that are contextually important, executing learned patterns that are less than optimally apt for the situation at hand.
Sometimes, I realize that I’m enmeshed in action totally divorced from the initial purpose: an e-errand turning into a rabbit hole; a meditation session that becomes more about sitting out the time than earnest engagement.
This is a pervasive, fundamental pattern. I doubt there is a quick fix: seems more like something to be managed over time. One thing I know for sure: I want to bring more of myself to the ongoing sequence of present moments.
I won’t let the illusion of a continous self stand in the way of engaging wholesomely.
“Getting things done”
ugh, planning meetings…
In a way, I’m principal-agent problem:ing myself, ending up with a mismatch between initiating timeslices and executing timeslices.
I picked up this idea from a podcast related to Evolving Ground:
What makes collaboration more & less common? Someone with a stable sense of self, doing things “because that’s how it’s down