Bridging the Gap From Here to Your Future Self |
Thinking about the self typically involves constructing a whole from the sum of past episodes of your life.
In a new study, imagining a future self helped people feel a stronger connection to their values.
By tracing the line of continuity from the past through the future, your life choices can be more fulfilling.
As you think about the person you are now, the chances are you built this from your memories of the past. The camera app on your phone pushes out photos of yourself over past years, sometimes stretching into a couple of decades. You are reminded of past events that you may have let slip away from memory, and as these images flip by, your connection to your former self only gains in strength.
But what about the future? Obviously, you can’t “see into” the future the way you see into the past, but have you ever thought about where life is taking you to get from here to there? You know logically that you will be the same person you are now as you project into the coming years, but this foggier and less certain vision can make this a challenging exercise.
Projection Into the Future and Your Sense of Self
According to new research by Karlstad University’s Jonas Blom and colleagues (2026), the ability to envision the future could be highly valuable as you make important life decisions. Benny is at a choice point in a new relationship where he could either commit to this partner or suggest they take things more slowly. Affecting this decision is his assessment of how things are going now, but as Blom et al. suggest, maybe he should do some crystal ball-gazing to see if he thinks........