A variant of the social contract: Temporal contracts between our-selves
"All self help could be sort of summarized in two words: Prioritize later" - Jimmy Carr
In a past post I explored and established that the past and futures of our selves are effectively equivalently independent selves. Given these selves as effectively different people, why do we nonetheless plan for the future, work out, work hard in the present, in the hopes of a future payoff?
My belief: These decisions are a result of a social contract where the society involved is no one of you and me and our neighbors, but rather a society made up of the population of our-selves, in past, present, and future tense. Imagine living in a world and establishing rule of engagement not with you and your spouse and kids, but rather a world made up of you in each year / month / minute of your life.
Just like a society where you and I agree to not rob each other, to hold open doors, and to let young kids and mothers take the seat on the muni, our temporal selves have an implicity negotiated set of norms and contracts with each other too.
Collectively, we all agree to exercise consideration for our future selves, because to break this contract means my present self being worse off on account of decisions made by our prior selves. I will exercise now, but I appreciate that my current health is a result of my past self exercising. There is an agreement between all of our selves that - hey, if I will take good care of my body, you will too. Not too dissimilar to agreeing to keep to the same side of the road. (Though in the case of temporal contracts, there is no larger authority to police and enforce these contracts - something to explore in a future post).
What then happens when the temporal contract breaks apart? I'm interested in this question, transparently because the present world's social contracts have very much been falling into disrepair. And neither the Democrats nor Republicans are absolved of responsibility. Under Democrats, it's their inability to uphold the contract on crime, on personal accountability - the contracts between our present selves. For Republicans, funnily enough I think theirs is a breakdown of the contract between us (a larger collective of selves) vs them. Where both approaches deserve reproach is where they have failed to adequately account for and uphold their commitments to their future temporal selves. Perhaps at first glance this may not seem clear. But taking the example of the Republican repudiation of Equity, the draw back of support for the struggling (USAID, and internal programs like Medicaid and Food stamps, and Education) is not just about Government waste, but a philosophical rejection of the value and missions of said programs. This is a myopic temporal view. In its underlying essence, the Republican philosophy is a rejection of the consideration for the future generations, as these programs are all seeds that sprout outsized rewards in the future. Again, Democrats too are not free from this criticism. This is a topic I will explore more in a future post.
But returning to the topic at hand: temporal contracts between our-selves. If we think of these implicit contracts as negotiations based on quid pro quo (I'll sacrifice myself for a future self, understanding a prior self will sacrifice their needs for mine)... we could expect, and do in in fact see a breakdown where these quid pro quo relationships are the weakest - in early life, and end of life.
Early life selves have very little incentive to invest in their future selves despite the return being the greatest over the entire lifespan. If one were to optimize for the sum of outcomes across temporal selves (debatable if that indeed ought to be the optimisation function, but let's take this as the given), there is a mismatch here between incentives and the ideal actions to take. There are a few reasons for this disconnect. Putting aside that the brain is underdeveloped in early life, there is little education or empirical experience to inform the appreciation for the compounding impact of decisions, or rather even just the straightforward cause and effect of them at all. It took me until my late 20s to learn to moderate my drinking - I probably had 20-30+ hangovers that made me question the worthiness of my continued existence before I came to the conclusion that I probably shouldn't pick up these next 4 drinks in consideration for the self that would wake up the next morning. And it took me till my late 30s to appreciate that grabbing a boba at 10pm at night was not worth the consequences the next day. You may conclude that I'm a slow learner. I'd concur that you are right. Nonetheless it proves the point. Not only do early life selves have little structural incentive to sacrifice for the future, they have learned very little empathy for the importance of their decisions on their future selves.
End of life selves have similarly very little incentive to invest in their future selves. The payoff in that case is not very great. In this case, the good news is that incentives are much more aligned with the ideal actions. The problem that remains though, is that it is often unknown how much time one has left. Following this train of thought then, getting a terminal diagnosis with a date is then in a ways a gift. Hot take: the characters in all of the Final Destinations really should have spent their efforts optimising for their remaining time than fighting it. Yes, it is sad to have knowledge that your life is ending. Likely sooner than you would have liked or expected. But knowing your last day doesn't change reality, it merely exposes the knowledge. But with it, you will be now able to optimise your last days. You won't end up overinvesting in your future selves that do not really exist. Eat that cheeseburger. Spend down your savings so that you have exactly $0 on the day you die. Quit your job and hike the Pacific Crest Trail. This makes sense in the most simplistic model of course, where the self you are optimising for ends at death. Having a family / people / things you care about exponentially complicates the calculus here. (Though it further supports my thesis that our future selves have actually very little in fundamental difference to other selves beyond how much we choose to care about either). Yet another area to explore in another post.
Middle life is another very interesting phase of life. In this phase most people have garnered an appreciation for the impact of past decisions on their present selves, and have enough of an expected life span to care about the tradeoff between present and future (where I, unironically find myself). Whether it's the college major they picked, the person they chose the marry, or just how diligent they were with applying sunscreen. I'd argue this realisation or reckoning of temporal selves is one of the core drivers of the midlife crisis. A mid life crisis is very much like a meeting of all of your selves, past, current, and future. Imagine every year of you, gathered in a room. A mid life crisis is that. First we open with a retrospective. Why do I find myself where I am in life? Why did / didn't I make better decisions? What regrets do I have? The retro is then followed by a forward looking sprint planning session: How much time do I have left? What do I want to change about my life now (buy a convertible)? How much am I willing to change / sacrifice for my future happiness (change my career, divorce my spouse)?
I would love to explore this further in this post, but it's getting long, and my other responsibilities beckon. I'll end with this: Temporal selves and the contract and act of negotiations between them are the underlying, often unrecognized or unarticulated drivers behind what we do. As I opened with, most social contract or moral philosophies boil back down to the foundational question of what is the temporal maximization function. In the case of utilitarianism, basically of all your temporal selves assembled in that room, do we optimise for the sum of all their happiness? Or do some matter more than others, or is there perhaps a minimum we want to maintain or is there some other kind of optimisation function? And knowing structural misalignments between early life incentives vs future life considerations, what can we do to bring these into better alignment? These explorations and questions are no different from many other debates and discussions from how we optimise between the you, me, them selves in a current span of time. What's fascinating to me is that present me vs future me philosophy or discussions tend to be separated from you vs me philosophic discussions, and they really should not. As for my personal temporal contract: I don't think I've quite found a conviction behind the optimisation function that is right for me, but I believe that this journey of understanding the problem, and the impact of my decisions, will provide me with an increased intentionality and agency to discover the right answer for me.