Here is a great concept that I had never considered in a book called, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert.
“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. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat In The Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something – a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger, we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, a minute, or a decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
Yeah, Yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could have been so stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack. No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell were we thinking. They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn’t good enough for them.
How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know that tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year – or at least later this afternoon? Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives – to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slip covers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come? So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing or useless? Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove tattoos that we paid good money to get? Why do they experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather than pride and appreciation? We might understand all of this if we had neglected them, ignored them, mistreated them in some fundamental way – but damn it, we gave them the best years of our lives! How can they be disappointed when we accomplished our coveted goals, and why are they so damned giddy when they end up in precisely the spot we worked so hard to steer them clear of? Is something wrong with them?
Or is something wrong with us?” Daniel Gilbert
I love this concept that we are making choices today so that the US of our future will be happy, when we can’t possible know that the US in the future will be like, want, need or anything! And we work harder to please the US we don’t know than we do on please the US of today!
I say do today what you love.
Do it each day for the rest of your life and give up on the future US.
I M Perfect lady 