As a child I remember watching the Disney cartoon recounting the story of “The Three Little Pigs” and insisting that my mum repeatedly played the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” The story, in brief, begins with mother pig sending her three beloved little pigs out into the world to seek their fortune. The first pig was lazy and built his house of straw, the second was a bit more diligent and built his house of sticks, and the third, who understood the importance of hard work, built his house out of bricks. By the end of the tale a hungry wolf has blown down the houses of the first two pigs and eaten them both. He failed, however, to blow down the brick house, is tricked and killed by the third pig.
The moral of the story is about the importance of thinking ahead and sacrificing short-term gratification for future security. Similar stories are told across most cultures (USA, Italy, and Russia, for example). Indeed, all of us as children have been regaled with folk stories that highlight the importance of making sacrifices in the present to ensure a better future. These tales typically highlight that there are consequences of taking short-cuts, and that rewards only come from daily sacrifice and hard work. As adults, the moral of these tales is often lost on us. Too frequently and inappropriately we sacrifice our future-selves to the pleasures, pressures, and priorities of the present.
This article highlights the importance of appropriate sacrifice, why we have problems making sacrifices to our future-selves, and some of the strategies we can deploy to help get the balance right.
What is Appropriate Sacrifice?
Sacrifice is associated with the act of making an offering to God or the Gods. The reasons for doing so are dependent on specific religious beliefs, but include showing devotion, gratitude, appeasement, atonement, and favour seeking. There is commonality across cultures however, and the main goal of making a sacrificial offering is to seek the establishment of a harmonious relationship with the Divine, and in doing so securing a better future.
Back in the mortal realm, personal sacrifice parallels this idea - we give up something of value today to create a more harmonious relationship with the future. A more straightforward way of thinking about this idea is that we are investing the assets/gifts we have today in return for greater assets/gifts tomorrow. So, for example, investing time and money today to study for an MBA with the anticipation that the investment will pay dividends in the future – to reach our full potential, have greater self-confidence, do a bigger and more challenging role, have higher earnings.
The idea of investment is key. We are in the world of risk and return and, consequently, trading off current certainty (having fun now) against future uncertainty (I am awarded my MBA, but it may not confer the anticipated benefit).
The risk/reward concept is also well understood through the stories we tell each other. In the Book of Genesis, for example, the brothers Cain, a farmer, and Abel, a shepherd, both make sacrifices to God as an act of worship. Abel’s offering is accepted by God and Cain’s is rejected. In a jealous rage Cain murders Abel. God casts Cain out for his crime – protecting him from harm but cursing his crops to always fail and forcing him to wander the wilderness, for the long years ahead of him, isolated from others.
It is unclear why God rejected Cain’s sacrifice. Perhaps Cain did not offer his best, or perhaps he did, but for whatever unbeknown reason his offering was still insufficient to guarantee God’s favour. Certainly, the simple moral lesson from the story is that we should sacrifice our best and failure to do so will lead us to the actual, and mental, torture of a future with no security, and the isolation of knowing we fell short of our dreams. The full moral lesson though includes the idea that we should sacrifice our best to the future, but that even when we do there is no guarantee of success.
It is understandable in the Cain and Abel story that they were asked to sacrifice ‘their best’ to what is of most value to them, in this case God. In everyday situations, however, a whole range of factors affect whether we sacrifice and the degree of sacrifice we are prepared to make. These include the perceived future value of the reward, our judgment of the probability that the reward will be realized, and our personal risk appetite.
Whether or not the sacrifice made is ‘appropriate’ cannot be known at the outset and making any sacrifice is ultimately an act of faith, the veracity of which is only judged through the unfolding of time.
So, ultimately, choices about sacrifice, including appropriateness, rest with the individual’s motivations, mindsets, intellect, and personality. It is pertinent, then, to ask what some of the major factors are that stop people making appropriate sacrifices.
Looking Out for Future-You
The Search for Meaning: The idea of sacrifice is meaningless unless we understand it as being in support of a future goal – health, financial security etc. Sacrifice is always in support of a purpose; the more important the goal is to us, and the more we see ourselves as accountable for its delivery, the more we will sacrifice in its pursuit.
The importance of having a meaning in life is compellingly and heart-wrenchingly discussed by holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist, in his account of his internment in Auschwitz and Dachau. During his time in the concentration camps Frankl witnessed unimaginable acts of depravity and dehumanization. He noticed, however, that whilst some prisoners developed, and held onto, a sense of inner freedom and meaning others succumbed to despair and the consequences of it. He concluded, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. That is, for Frankl, concentration camp survival was, at least in part, dependent on one’s ability to stand outside the immediate situation, to find meaning, and use it as a source of inspiration and resilience.
Frankl postulated an innate unconscious driving force, the ‘will to meaning’, that is present in all of us. Meaning is not a given and we are driven to discover it. Our search though is not directionless, and our discovered meaning is in service of a higher purpose. To thrive, then, we need to find our own purpose in the context of our own life and circumstances. Once we have identified our purpose, the key to fulfilment is to take responsibility to pursue it unrelentingly with passion.
From his observations in the concentration camps Frankl identified three sources of meaning – work, love, and attitude towards suffering. Indeed, much of Frankl’s time as a prisoner was spent imagining being reunited with his wife, dreaming of rewriting a confiscated psychoanalytic manuscript – his contribution to society – and finding fulfilment in his support for the sick and dying in the camp’s hospital.
Frankl demonstrates the sustaining and motivating impact of meaning. In today’s post-structural and existential[1] societies there is a crisis of meaning (Vervaeke, and Pattakos and Dundon), and as Nietzsche foretold “God is dead”. We are now freer than ever to choose our own morals and how we live. But as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew, people cope poorly with the freedoms of moral choice and the need to establish meaning in their own lives. The results of a predominance of existentialist/post-structural beliefs are clear – an increase in the fear of death, in narcissism, hedonism, alienation, anxiety, and ideological tribalism.
The trend toward existentialist/post structuralist thinking seems here to stay. The extreme of which is nihilism (there is no meaning in life to be found). If you want, however, to live a life that realises your full potential and creates value for your family and society, then taking on the existentialist challenge of identifying your meaning in support of some higher good, taking responsibility for living that purpose, and of making the appropriate sacrifices is the only route to ensure success.
Loose Connections to Our Future-Self: The second challenge we need to overcome is that we seem wired to focus more on our needs of today than tomorrow. Neuroscience has conclusively shown that we care about ourselves. Indeed, there is a whole area of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, that is dedicated to the ‘self’. The problem is that self in this context is ‘self’ today. When people are asked to think about their future-self another area of the brain becomes active. This area of the brain is the one we use to empathise with others – the temporal parietal junction. We care about our future-selves about as much as we care for others. And, sadly, this is less than we care for our current-self. If we turn off the temporal parietal junction our empathy for our future-self is dialled down and we are, for example, more prone to spending our money right now rather than save for the future i.e., we do not fully consider the interests of our future-self and trade off our future to satisfy our immediate needs.
Hershfield points out that we can think about ourselves at various points in the future with each version of us being bound to the other by a series of interlocking chains. But as we look further into the distance the links on the chain become weaker and weaker. The consequence is that far away versions of ourselves are treated like strangers.
Additionally, we have a strong tendency to be anchored in the present i.e., we excessively weight our desires and emotions in the here and now. So, for example, people will often trade off the certainty of a prize today against a big prize offered in a few weeks’ time. The future reward carries a higher level of uncertainty, and it may make sense to accept the smaller prize today. People, however, have a present bias and typically over-discount the future in favour of today. For example, buying a new TV on a credit card and still paying for it over 24 months’ time at an exorbitant rate of interest. Or going to the bar for a glass of wine instead of doing your scheduled exercise.
Our emotions (lust, pride, envy etc.) further reinforce our focus on the present. They do so by acting like a spotlight on immediately available awards drawing our attention to them, like a moth to a flame. For example, when we have the choice of receiving a cash sum now or a bigger amount in the future, then our desire for immediate gratification holds sway and we will often take the smaller amount of money immediately. This is the case, even when this decision doesn’t make economic sense, and there is no need for immediate access to the money.
Given that we do not resonate with our future-self nearly as much as our current-self, that we are transfixed by our emotions in the here and now, and that we perceive time to travel more slowly in the present, then it is of no surprise that we typically act as if we are pre-programmed not to sacrifice sufficiently to our future-selves.
Warped Future Judgment
There are many aspects of personality as well that impact how appropriately we sacrifice to the future; for example, our levels of anxiety, which can impact risk perception and courage to act, or our levels of conscientiousness, which impact our goal orientation and planfulness. Two of the most salient are our tendency to procrastinate and, hence, delay acting. And our poor judgment about how the future will unfold; hence how well we understand our future attitudes and needs.
About 20% of us are chronic procrastinators (Ferrari & Tibet), although most of us report procrastination problems. Procrastination is a voluntary delay in action, despite the knowledge that the delay may be harmful. It is associated with a raft of health and wellbeing issues including poor self-esteem, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease.
Procrastinators do think about their future-self; the trouble, however, is they do not get around to doing the detailed thinking and planning necessary to ensure that they realize their ideal future. Here too, lack of empathy with our future-self seems to be the main issue. There are many tasks that we need to do but would prefer to delay. These aversive tasks (paperwork, tidying the house, planning for our future etc.) draw out our negative emotions (boredom, anxiety, fear of failure, resentfulness etc.). One of the reasons we procrastinate is that feeling good today, by not doing the aversive task, takes precedence over our mood tomorrow. Our future-self will still experience negative emotions when we tackle the problematical task, but we can ‘kick the (aversive) can down the road’ indefinitely. Procrastination, consequently, leads to incomplete attention to the future and our goals, which results in insufficient sacrifice or wrongly defined future aspirations.
Procrastination is not, however, the only problem we need to tackle to fully understand our future-self and our aspirations. Our judgments about the future are flawed. Indeed, even when experts are asked to make predictions about the economy, stocks, elections, and other social issues, their predictions are about as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. The risk is that predictions about our future-selves are similarly flawed and that we sacrifice to the wrong goal.
There are two main future judgment errors. The first is simply that we are no better than the experts at predicting the nature of the future. We tend to assume the future world will be very much like today’s. Consequently, we fall prey to numerous fallacies - including the Linear Projection Fallacy which discounts the dynamic nature of change, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (cherry-picking data sources), and the Bandwagon Fallacy (going along with the crowd). We know from the research on superforecastingthat we can learn the skills to better predict the future, but most of us are not in the 2% of people who have a natural talent in this area, and we remain prone to chasing the wrong future
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The second judgment error relates to knowledge of our future-self. Here, we are better than dart-throwing chimpanzees, but we are prone to biases in making judgments today that our future-self regrets. Whilst we recognise that we have changed significantly from our past-selves, when we look forward, we assume that our future-self will be the same as today’s version of us. Consequently, when we contemplate our future, it is rooted in our present values, preferences, and personalities. This bias is prevalent; for example, we get married today with the firm belief that our future feelings towards our spouse won’t change, or that we will remain passionate about hillwalking or Pilates for the rest of our lives. So, if we do not empathize sufficiently with our future-self and explore how we are likely to change, there is an enormous risk that our future-self will be disappointed with our lot in life.
The factors governing appropriateness of sacrifice are complex. They cover clarity of meaning, strength of connection to our future-self, bias towards our current-self, personality, procrastination, judgment biases, ability to predict future societal trends etc. Many of the factors are inter-related; however, we can deduce two main reasons that underpin failure to sacrifice appropriately. The first is the lack of empathy with our future-self, and the second is the lack of clarity about purpose/meaning in life.
Shake Hands with Future-You
The psychology/neuroscience allows us to infer these same lessons from the stories we heard as children. In the story of the Three Little Pigs, for example, two of the little pigs failed to empathize sufficiently with the needs of their future-selves and didn’t build brick houses. Consequently, they were eaten by the wolf. This is because they both lacked sufficient clarity of meaning in their life to sufficiently strengthen the links in the chain that binds their current-self to their future-self. And because they were too focussed on the needs of their current-self they paid the future consequences.
The explanation is not as pithy as the moral lesson in the story but allows us to better identify approaches to help us overcome the difficulties of meaning and appropriately sacrificing to our future-selves. There are many helpful techniques to support appropriate future sacrifice which range from the psychoanalytic (Frankl’s Logotherapy) through to positive psychology (Mental Contrasting). Shah et al, for example, demonstrate the impact of getting people to think carefully and concretely about their future-selves. In this case, they successfully encouraged people to save more for their pensions.
One highly effective technique that we can use ourselves is a self-reflection, goal setting and writing task, called Self-Authoring[2]. Structured writing forces detailed thinking about our past, present, and future from various perspectives. Self-Authoring positively impacts a whole range of life outcomes - including performance, and physical and mental health. Schippers et al, for example, found that self-authoring boosted attendance rates, academic performance, and reduced academic program turnover.
Self-Authoring supports appropriate sacrifice in three main ways. First, it comprehensively introduces us to our future-self: our aspirations, our motives, the stories we want to tell of our life, and ultimately how we derive meaning, and our superordinate purpose. Second, it forces us to identify the gap between where we are today and where we want to be across multiple elements of our life (family, career, leisure etc.). And third, based on this detailed information, it requires us to meticulously plan and set goals to detail a precise journey from where we are today to our preferred destiny[3].
Following a structured writing process is critical. The more vivid the picture of current and future-self the better the impact. Showing people images, for example, of their aged-self or ideal-self has a more positive impact on self-sacrifice than simply imagining future-self. Hershfield recounts the practice of companies, such as Prudential, who introduce employees to photos of their future-self, at Benefit Fairs, resulting in an uplift in pension contributions. Consequently, the structured writing process is necessarily lengthy if vivid narratives are to be created - perhaps eight hours or more.
Aged photos are now just a few clicks away on your mobile device and are a great supplement to structured writing. Structured writing alone, however, helps to create a vivid picture by asking the author to consider themselves through various lenses – past, current, and future-self, social life, family life, leisure time, career, and the qualities admired in others. In parallel, a self-assessment of values, interests, strengths, and development needs, each highlighted with honest stories, helps to build an even richer picture. Self-authoring should be an annual process, not a once-in-a-lifetime exercise. The structured approach clarifies meaning and strengthens the links to future-self, thus reducing current-self bias. Unfortunately, these links slowly weaken if we fail to repeat the exercise. Updating the document though is more straightforward; for example, our purpose tends to be relatively enduring.
Writing exercises, such as self-authoring, are very person-centric and there is a risk of the future world not accommodating our goals. The main unknown, but predictable, future risks are around career aspirations; for example, there are known risks from generative AI to many professional roles including traders and lawyers. Planning a long way into the future requires some detailed sanity checking about changes in jobs, career paths and organizations.
A Final Word
We have travelled a long way from the basic moral lessons of fables, myths, stories, and legends to understand some of the challenges we have in meaning making and empathizing with our future-selves. And hence the making of appropriate sacrifice.
You are heading somewhere in your life. The important question is whether you are as in control of that destiny as you can be. From all you know now, do you still trust your current-self to have your future-self’s best interests at heart? Do you have faith in your destiny? I hope not. Insufficiently sacrificing to our future-self is a significant risk for all of us.
You can now do something about that!
Main References
Procrastination, Encyclopedia of Personality, and Individual Differences, Ferrari, and Tibbett, 2020
Superforecasting. The Art & Science of Prediction, Tetlock & Gardener, 2015
Your Future Self, Hershfield, 2023
Zombies in Western Culture, Vervaeke et al, 2017
Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl, 1946
Prisoner of Our Thoughts, Pattakos & Dundon, 2017
The Benefits of Writing, Peterson & Mar, 2016
Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative, Journal of Clinical Psychology, Pennebaker and Seagal, 1999 (Pennebaker, J. W., & Seagal, J. D. (1999)
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky, 1958 (translation)
Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, Pychyl, 2010
A Scalable Goal-Setting Intervention Closes Both the Gender & Ethnic Minority Achievement Gap, Nature, Schippers et al, 2015
End.
[1] Post-structuralism challenges the notions of objective truth, reality and meaning. It regards all absolutes as constructions and open to critique. Existentialism is a belief that the world has no meaning (for example, not the higher authority of a Deity).and consequently, stresses a person’s responsibility for their own actions
[2] There are several open/fee access self-authoring tools available. The most in-depth one I’ve reviewed is available at www.selfauthoring.com
[3] Self-authoring draws mainly on goal-setting approaches to planning for the future. A small improvement to open access tools would be a greater focus on fully expressing the ‘why’ and meaning. This is implicit though in the stories developed.