Difficulty Picturing Our Future Selves
Logically, I know that what people regret most often as they are close to dying are the actions they didn’t take rather than the ones that they did. People are more likely to regret not having quit their job to start a business, asking that pretty girl out, or moving across the country to chase their dream than they are having started the business that failed, asked the girl and been rejected, or moved west to find out they didn’t actually like it. It is easier for humans to see the results of their actions as opposed to the results of their inaction. I actually wrote (or tried to, it turns out science is tough) a whole thesis on this idea which is known as omission bias. Omission bias is “the phenomenon in which people prefer omission (inaction) over commission (action) and tend to judge harm as a result of commission more negatively than harm as a result of omission”. Omission bias acknowledges that while we often are very aware of the cost of action (say starting a new business and it failing or going bankrupt), we tend to neglect the cost of inaction (staying at your soul-sucking job and being miserable or unfulfilled). This lack of awareness has significant affects on the decisions we make from day to day that go on to shape our lives.
Towards the end of high school I came across Dan Ariely’s TED talk and dove headfirst into his books along with stumbling on Freakonomics. Behavioral economics was a field that combined decision-making and the psychology behind it with incentives and ideas of the way the world was supposed to work vs. how it actually worked. These discoveries spawned my love for behavioral economics and shaped the next four years of my life in which I pursued a degree in economics. I learned all about the dozens of cognitive biases that people fall prey to in everyday life and attempted to craft a question measuring one of them for my honors thesis. Humans are always using heuristics (rules of thumb) to make decisions in an endlessly complicated and evolving world. While these save us mental effort and anguish, they often leads us to suboptimal and unrealistic conclusions.
After years of learning about them, one thing struck me the most about these cognitive biases. What struck me was that no matter how well I understood them, I was still just as likely to fall victim to them as people who had no idea they existed. This was both maddening and hilarious to me. Despite being a high schooler who loved the idea of opportunity cost and kept it in mind when deciding how to walk through the hallways my senior year (not kidding), knowledge didn’t insulate me from making the same mistakes. Despite knowing all of this, it is still so hard to make the leap and put myself in the shoes of future Robert and convince current Robert of all the things he will regret NOT TRYING. I guess this article serves as a reminder to myself as much as it does to anyone who may be reading it. Do the things, you might regret them and you might not, but you’ll always regret not having tried or been true to your inner self.