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Most of us struggle to plan for next week, month or even next year. After all, when did you last think about the future? The really far, distant future? Maybe if you’re a fan of science fiction, or an astrophysicist or work in high-tech, you naturally contemplate far horizons. But if you’re like most of us, the immediate needs of today usually dominate.
It’s so common, behavioral economists even have a name for this tendency — present bias — as all those urgent, pressing demands of right now naturally crowd out tomorrow. (Want proof? Take a look at your to-do list — how many items on it will help your future you? Highlight anything that will help you in a year, five or 10 years. A quick glance at mine shows I’m barely keeping pace with right now.)
This isn’t just a problem of a lack of imagination, but can literally impede us from working toward longer-term goals. There are efforts to help us correct such tendencies. Some paper planners make room for future goals. Technology too, can help us, such as Google’s Goals, which fills gaps in our calendars for us to make sure we don’t neglect that wish to learn a language or take that class or climb that mountain we never seem to make time for on our own.
The cost of not thinking about our future goals can be high — as it literally means most of us are not planning adequately. They may be shorter-term wishes like planning for vacation, school — college or graduate school — or to buy a home. Or they might be much longer-term like what do you want your retirement to look like? A responsible financial adviser will nudge you in that direction and design a plan around trying to fulfill those goals for your future you — even your future legacy — are you charitably inclined? How do you want to provide, if at all for future heirs?
But an unusual micro-site and survey launched by Prudential this month, created with insight from a very future-minded panel including Ford Motor Company’s head futurist Sheryl Connelly could provide some tools to help advance our thinking even further. (A Q&A with another panelist, Martha Deevy, senior research scholar and director of financial security at the Stanford Center on Longevity, is here.) The site developed in part as a survey of millennial attitudes imagining life in 2068 as well as trying to bridge the gap between now and then. (Results of the survey are here.)
“One of the human behaviors that stands in the way of Millennials and others in saving for retirement is the longevity disconnect,” Harry Dalessio, head of full services solutions for Prudential Retirement, told me about the idea behind the micro-site and survey. “When people think of themselves in the future, the brain actually views that as a stranger.”
Contemplating the questions can be revealing in and of itself: for starters, I know I haven’t given any thought about the year 2060-whatever (beyond so-labeled target date funds that do the thinking for you,) or as the survey describes, what will 80-year old you be like? The questions prompt reflection not just about “the future,” but how do you feel about future scenarios? For example, are you nervous about self-driving cars? Do you expect to have a relationship with your computer? Do you believe automation will take over your job and your investments? How do you feel about a gig economy or the possibility that employers will not provide health care or retirement benefits? What do you think your retirement will look like? And how do you feel about all those things happening? The natural next question is, what are you doing to plan for a future you want to have? What are your ideal preferences?
Alternately, there is another approach to thinking about how you want to prepare for the future. Try asking a parent, grandparent or even an older friend or neighbor about what they did right in adapting to future technologies, a changing workplace, for their future health and retirement and what they wish they had done differently. Morningstar’s senior behavioral scientist Sarah Newcomb’s recent research on the value of identifying a role model could also lead you to a family member — granted the particulars of their futures looked different from what ours will likely be, but how they prepared for it, or whether they prepared adequately for it, requires the same tools. As long as we carve out time to do so.
