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We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment

303 points by rrherr 9y ago

lngnmn 9y ago
Bullshit. We are built by evolution to live in this particular physical environment and had no trouble living there for last few millions of years or so. What we are not evolved to do is to live in an overpopulated urban areas, forced to wage slavery and to constantly compete for everything, even a place in a subway, while being awashed with emotionally charged verbal and visual bullshit 24h, hipsterism and other forms of idiotic cosplay of unearned success and presumably high social status by each and every one passed by, while being over-regulated by stupid laws imposed on us by a bloated self-serving "government" so even a straight look of contempt at a tasteless, fat woman in some stupid yoga pants would lead to trouble. the Moment has nothing to do with this. It is so called "human society".
- ghthor 9y ago
  I'm perfectly happy living in one of those urban areas. I speak out when the people around me are doing things that are rude or dangerous or disgusting and then I move on. My actions towards others are intended to avoid causing all the problems you're describing(anxiety, self-doubt, nervousness); hopefully they inspire others to be considerate or change their behavior. The mindfulness skills that cities help cultivate are acceptance and releasing(letting go). If you find yourself constantly angry or stressed or nervous about other people you should probably remove yourself from the situation, relax and let it go. If you aren't prepared for confrontation or are worried about the situation escalating then use the moments before you let it go to come up with other ways to potentially solve the problem. Get crazy with it, like making a bunch of untraceable fliers, or making a long anonymous post to some digital community related to the location or activity. Their are lots of ways to influence how people act in the long term, in the short term direct confrontation almost always works. Situations where you're unable to remove yourself from the area to avoid someone are the worst. This is why performances on the subway piss me off so much, or people ranting about something. I've been making a point to directly confront anyone doing anything that makes me uncomfortable on the subway and tell them why it makes me uncomfortable and that they need to stop. Just today some women came on the train and started yelling about eating a plant based diet, how it was good for the planet. I agree with her and I'm on and off vegan, but it's NOT fucking cool to start yelling on the subway unless you're getting violated by someone or you're in danger. I snapped her with my spectacles repeating, "ma'am, would you stop yelling on the train", ending with, "You're making all vegans look bad." She did finally stop
  - crush-n-spread 9y ago
    I think the point is not that humans can learn to cope with urban environments, like you suggest - The point is that humans weren't meant to live in them. Everything the parent poster says is true, and you're just saying "Humans can get to a point where it's tolerable." I for one think I should not have a verbal and visual barrage of bullshit hit me with full force everyday, powered by the interests of multinational tech companies or governments. Peace and quiet is something that should be treasured, not lost and then made up for with mental tricks.
    - workerIbe 9y ago
      Funny, at any moment I might agree with each of you. One moment (actually a few days) I will dream of a simpler time or maybe some post apocalyptic future another I am soaking in the barrage quite amused by it and the puzzle of it's purpose and yet another influencing and enjoying those around me. I have no plan ( more than a few days), I live in the moment.
    - Banthum 9y ago
      You could consider going to live in a rural area and getting a simpler job. It's a real option and many people choose it.
      - crush-n-spread 9y ago
        I appreciate the suggestion. I am 22 and happened to grow up in a very small town of ~400 people without internet until I was 16. I moved to the city to get software work and I will stay here for the rest of my life. So I guess I'm a hypocrite.
    - ghthor 9y ago
      I agree. My long term plan with my life is to acquire the wealth and knowledge to build and maintain my own life using permaculture. I'd say I agree with you and the thread OP that we weren't made to live in these nasty, dirty, stressing urban environments. My main point is that the knowledge in this article arms you with the idea that you can cope and live within these non-humane environments by basically hacking your brain(avoiding negative prediction paths). You could call it raising your awareness to a higher level of consciousness. So, while you still might notice from time to time someone is doing something gross or that would annoy you, you no longer focus on it. You let it go, you focus on something else, your breathe, your balance, what you making for dinner, how much you love someone, how bad our infrastructure is, how to solve that problem at work, how not to solve that problem at work, how did that nasty ass smear get on the subway door's window?
- ucontrol 9y ago
  In my opinion, many people make this mistake by believing that just because we've evolved to live a certain lifestyle (the example being pre-civilization hunter-gatherer societies) - that this way of life is indisputably the most comfortable and natural way for us to live, and that deviating from this lifestyle in any way is almost always detrimental. In other words, they fail to take into consideration that reduction of challenge (e.g. through technological means) is also change in everyday behavior that deviates from the "orthodox" way of living, but nevertheless it makes life much better. We don't live how our bodies intended to live, and prehistoric behaviors are no longer practiced - but the fact that there is no need anymore to exercise this sort of behavior is a good thing, since the necessity to do so implied struggle, discomfort and scarcity - all unfavorable circumstance. In short - living as nature intended implied struggle, and the cessation of that way of life is in many ways a result of removal of struggle, and not necessarily just some "unorthodox" living that allegedly puts our being under unnaturally high amounts stress. My point: Yes, the contemporary lifestyle is stressful, and yes it is very different from the way we've evolved to live, but it's probably still much more comfortable and enjoyable than any aboriginal circumstance and prehistoric way of life our ancestors found themselves in.
  - ghthor 9y ago
    I'd argue that some of our ancestors lived in quite egalitarian groups of abundance even without the technology we have today; And conversely our world today is drive by inequality and scarcity despite our amazing technology. What technology has really given us is security. The paradise of our ancestors could have been ruined by disease or famine caused by the climate changing or and unexpected flood. Or just a new group of predators moving into the region making it dangerous or killing off the prime game food for the tribe. Our technology and knowledge provides us security and foresight so we're able to move or stockpile or even invent new technology to avoid catastrophes. Sadly, here we are faced with the total disruption of our biosphere and we're having trouble not fucking it up. One, I believe people feel this way about our ancestors because of the feelings one experiences when they really visit and listen to nature. I for one can almost solve any emotional problems with a good walk in the woods. This feeling drives our awareness of the discomfort that our civilization shoves down our throat everyday. We've used technology to simplify our lives and complicate our lives. Right now I think we've complicated our individual lives quite a lot, but with that complication comes a security that someone else did enough work that I can get something eat tomorrow.
ktRolster 9y ago
I wasn't 'built' to type letters.
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  Well, we built the device you type them on to fit our body, not the other way around.
  - ghthor 9y ago
    We did a poor job of "fitting" it to our body and I personally fear RSI pains every week due to how unfit our human-computer interfaces are. My dream is that room-scale VR will become a productive way to perform my job(designing, communicating and writing software) so that I'm up and moving around throughout the whole work day, arms and all, no long stretches of time in the same potentially tension producing position.
pbw 9y ago
This is a decent article but I strongly dislike the title. The phrasing "we aren't built for" is so pessimistic, as if being mindful (living in the moment) is hopeless or unachievable, or even undesirable or harmful. Thousands of years of meditation practices have proven that living in the moment is very possible. Yes our brains are constantly planning and scheming and trying to derail us, but this can be addressed with a modest amount of deliberate practice. Perhaps imagining the future is emblematic of humans, and maybe that has developed over the last 2 million years, but animals have been around 300 million years, and they are (presumably) quite adept at living in the moment. We can be as well. Striving towards that goal is very beneficial and rewarding. One entry point to meditation is Sam Harris's book Waking Up which I describe here: http://www.kmeme.com/2016/07/waking-up.html http://www.kmeme.com/2016/07/waking-up.html
- ghthor 9y ago
  I almost didn't read the article because of the title. As a avid practitioner of mindfulness meditation, I was turned off, "That's horseshit, being in the moment is what makes me happy and keeps me safe!" But after reading the article this just reinforces why meditation is so good at resolving anxiety and depression. Our brains AREN'T good at living in the moment, they are good at making predictions. Mediation is the process by which we LET GO and try to only OBSERVE the wild prediction process going on in our heads. Understanding this makes the article only reinforce the notion that meditation is so healthy for us as it teaches us to step away from our predictions before they spiral into depression or general anxiety disorder.
  - geomark 9y ago
    Indeed. That ttle broadcasts the message that "I don't meditate and I have no clue what it's about."
  - derrida 9y ago
    Once about half a month into a retreat, I was staring at blank space in a hut in the middle of the forrest, constantly distracted by fantasies of "a better blank space" - perhaps a nice cave with a walk in, or how I could make a little hut at home and go there every morning. It seems like once I had let go of everything, the mind even had a tendency to want to imagine better blank spaces. lol. The cases of people fantasising about better houses or cars are easy to see, but the fact that I saw it's possible the human mind can do this with blank space means it can do it with anything. :) It's just human nature. Denying things like this can create shadows and so on :) Saying this though, it's watching the mind. We aren't built to live in the moment, but never the less, something can see this! Something watches all this going on in the mind! What is that? Mostly we make a 'home' in attention and identify as our attention. But whatever was seeing 'me' fantasising about nice little architectural meditation huts in the middle of the forrest, that was indistinguishable from objective reality.
RichardHeart 9y ago
"Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it." Lots of things weren't possible, until they were. Focusing on paths towards a goal beats focusing on paths towards failure. Not focusing on death =/= not focusing on living. Healthspan is one of the easiest things to increase, and has hundreds of millions of people doing it whether they're aware of it or not, anyone that eats well or exercises is pro-longevity whether they realize it or not :) That could be considered anti-death behavior, without any need to focus on death at all.
ghthor 9y ago
Hits the nail on the head. Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks that are consistently making predictions about the next input in the stream of input signals as it changes over time. When the prediction results are correct we save a fuzzy recording of the higher-order-pattern that resulted in our correct prediction. Each time our predictions are correct that "memory" is reinforced so we're able to make faster predictions, at earlier points in the pattern. I hypothesize that the source of most anxiety or nervousness stems from our brains making no correct predictions in that moment. This is supported anecdotally by my patterns for overcoming social interactions that used to make me anxious that I've now become comfortable with. My brain now makes enough correct predictions that I don't feel the need to leave the situation. I hypothesize that part of why I started acting on my transgender feelings was because I'd become so uncomfortable in my own body that my brain wasn't able to make accurate predictions about the sensations coming from my within. This is supported anecdotally by the following. I started 2 activities when I accepted my desire to transition to female. Both were touted at reducing the feelings of un-comfortableness in my own body. Female to Male hormone therapy and taijiquan. Both produced lots of new feelings for my brain. Both gave me a sense of agency over my own body, the understanding that I have the ability to shape my body into what I want. In the end I stopped transitioning because taking the hormones(mostly the T blocker) isn't known to be healthy for the body(Liver/Kidneys). Taijiquan is almost unanimously a positive source of change in ones health for the rest of their lives therefore I choose taijiquan and a long healthy life over my desires to have female genitals. Practicing Taijiquan makes me feel better, and in regards to my gender dysphoria taijiquan has cured it; I am very comfortable with my male genitals now that I'm able to make enough consistent predictions during sex to remain engaged with the situation and remain turned on. Edit Addition: I'd like to state that I still identify as a cross dresser and I'm comfortable saying that love certain parts/styles of womens fashion and accessories. Example, I love long flowing skirts. As a society I feel we should reassess men wearing skirts as it is much healthier for our genitals.
- johndotsun 9y ago
  >Hits the nail on the head. Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks that are consistently making predictions about the next input in the stream of input signals as it changes over time. When the prediction results are correct we save a fuzzy recording of the higher-order-pattern that resulted in our correct prediction. Each time our predictions are correct that "memory" is reinforced so we're able to make faster predictions, at earlier points in the pattern. I'm not sure that I could ever be so confident in anything as you are to be stating so unequivocally how the brain works given the track record of previous attempts to model brain function and the current state of neuroscience.
runeks 9y ago
Just because it has been an evolutionary advantage for our mind to be constantly active, doesn't mean that this can't change. That's the point of evolution: we adapt to what's necessary and, for millions of years, constant thought was the factor that made us smarter than everyone else, and the humans in whom this didn't occur weren't smart enough, thus their genes disappeared from the gene pool. This, however, doesn't mean we can't keep evolving towards a state of consciousness where constant thought isn't required, it just means that -- as is always the case -- existence is challenging, because there's millions of years of inertia behind the mind. It has a strong pull, because it was needed for survival. But we can keep evolving. It doesn't need to continue like this forever. It just means that, as opposed to earlier, the people in whom thought is too strong and uncontrollable are now the ones whose genes are removed from the gene pool, through mental illness and anxiety. If you're willing to spend some time watching your mind, you'll realize that it already stops all the time, it's just a matter of noticing this, thus strengthening its absence. But don't expect there to be a button to push to make it stop. It was needed for survival, so its cessation has become associated with fear. But, while you are conscious of this fact, it's not a problem, just a challenge.
- solipsism 9y ago
  But we can keep evolving. By what mechanism? Evolution doesn't come about by sheer will.
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    True. Motivation is only one component of our perceptual sets. We also have to leverage our emotions, beliefs, and actions to align them with the motivation of evolving. Edit: Anyone care to suggest a reason why this comment's being downvoted?
    - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      Choosing the right actions is dependent on how you want to evolve. The right emotion is going to be joy. The only belief needed is that you can evolve in the way you want to. Also need to abandon beliefs to the contrary.
gallerdude 9y ago
Off topic: I love all the great longform NYT stuff HN posts, but can never find it on my own - where can I find it on my own?
- zachrose 9y ago
  Long-form NYT stuff is generally in the NYT Sunday Magazine (and its online equivalent).
  - gallerdude 9y ago
    Thanks!
    - tim333 9y ago
      See also: https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-york-times-magazine https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-york-times-mag... and similar
mattbgates 9y ago
We weren't built to pay taxes... but for some reason, someone thought it was a good idea and everyone else followed suit.
- Banthum 9y ago
  In fairness, we were "built to" live in social structures and dominance hierarchies. We were "built to" socially pool resources and act collectively. Taxes are just part of a really advanced system for doing that. There are groups of people who don't do taxes at all, but you probably don't want to live among them.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  Yes we were. Even the earliest hunter gatherers shared their bounty with the tribe.
- mattbgates 9y ago
  To clarify with the people who feel that we were built to pay taxes: it is not to say that we shouldn't help others and even establish forms of law and government and pay our dues. The social contract affirms that we must do this and it isn't free. So we must be willing to pay something "into the system" to have this. It is the fact that... how much in taxes do we have to pay until enough is enough? Our paychecks are taxed. Our toilet paper and food is taxed. Everything in life is taxed and even our deaths, at least our estates, are taxed. We weren't born or built to do this. This is an enforcement upon us that we agreed upon and we continue to do in order to live in the "social contract". We continuously feed this unending hungry greed money machine and "this is the way it is." Of course, there are people who "live off the grid" and found their way to pay nothing. There are also rich people who prefer to pay other people to find loopholes in order to avoid paying taxes too.
  - Bakary 9y ago
    I feel like you may be underestimating the value of this social contract. The convenience of the rule of law and developed comfort only really become apparent once they are gone.
gallerdude 9y ago
I do wonder where this fits in with meditation. Perhaps it's "clearing the cache," letting us re-explore options.
- ghthor 9y ago
  Clearing the cache of possible timelines seems possible. Also filtering out input, what to focus on and what to ignore. Meditation also opens up new pathways of input from our senses, or guides us to existing pathways that we'd never noticed is a better way to express that. New input gives us new places to start predicting from.
- ioddly 9y ago
  See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 Saying "built to" is a pretty strong statement. Constructing narratives about the future is one thing the human mind can do, and is clearly advantageous. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else is another.
gosheroo 9y ago
'Living in the moment' is a metaphor. Thoughts about the future always take place in the present.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  Exactly this! I'd also point out that thoughts of the past always occur in the present as well. And remembering something is not like replaying a movie, but every time you revisit a memory you change it a bit based on your current state. Remembering is an active process.
  - gosheroo 9y ago
    Yes indeed, including in some cases changing the temporal order of events based on reason or new data. For example, I once misheard a drinking mug shatter on the floor before it slid off the kitchen surface. But reason corrected the memory. https://hilo.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/310-Dennett-MultiDrafts.htm https://hilo.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/310-Dennett-MultiDrafts.... I'd like to add that I think 'living in the moment' is powerful and useful despite not being literally true because it points to something real and important.
    - gerbilly 9y ago
      Well the term 'living in the moment' is just a western paraphrasing of the much more subtle and thorough explanation of mindfulness in the original suttas.
jashper 9y ago
To think that our achievement was singular, is rather disappointing.
ddmma 9y ago
We're like a little scared squirrel that looks back and forth not having the capacity to understand and enjoy 'this' moment. I guess is because of how we perceive time and what we can do about it.
nebabyte 9y ago
Not according to Google [0]! Given their pitch to advertisers, we are built exactly to live in "moments" - all conveniently full of advertising opportunities ;) Depends on who you ask, I suppose. lol [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=cplXL-E1ioA https://youtube.com/watch?v=cplXL-E1ioA
suneilp 9y ago
This makes a lot of assumptions, like we know what really went on in the minds of our primitive ancestor's. Meditation, yoga, and martial arts has taught me that being in the moment actually makes prospecting easier and better. Not to mention the stress/anxiety relief, being better connected socially, etc. We've built up a lot of mental constructs over the millennia. These constructs are things like how we're taught to react/respond to various stimuli like emotions from ourselves and others. We're taught these by parents and society. And we constantly refine them for better or worse. There is so much going in this hyperconnected society that being in the moment has become hard and/or harder to maintain.
- ghthor 9y ago
  Perhaps being in the moment allows are prospecting to consistently start from reality. Where if your lost in a maze of possible futures it's easy to keep going to different starting points and generating lots of trash timelines. Where if you are starting your imagination from this moment right now the tree is shorter and more grounded in reality.
pdog 9y ago
What uniquely distinguishes our species, more than anything else, is our ability to tell stories. From hunting a mammoth to constructing an atomic device, everything depends on our ability to believe in a common story.
- 6stringmerc 9y ago
  Ever have a dream where you were in the past, like hunting or being chased or something? We pass on more than we recognize, I think. Hence consistent fear of heights and/or spiders.
- chillacy 9y ago
  I've been thinking about that a lot lately. We tell stories about ourselves and call it our identity. Often, we believe so strongly in our identities that we've killed for them or have been killed for them. One person can have one identity where they're a failure, then through therapy, they change their story and become happier. Same events, different story. There's also the cultural story: we descended from these people, we share an intellectual lineage with those people, these are the past events that are important, and this is what they reveal about us, etc.
  - l33tbro 9y ago
    Sounds like you may be interested in reading Professor Dan McAdams and the general field of narrative psychology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_psychology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_psychology
deleted 9y ago
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- bananaXbanana 9y ago
  What a useless comment. This section is to discuss the article, not your little anecdotes, predispositions and especially not for some random spam.
- mbrock 9y ago
  Here's a quote from your page: "There is nothing that is that important. As long as you believe this or that is so important, you are caught up in playing a game." Here's a quote from the article that you didn't read: "Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead." One of those is nihilistic...
6stringmerc 9y ago
You know how I can smell bullshit in this article? Right here: >Some of our unconscious powers of prospection are shared by animals, but hardly any other creatures are capable of thinking more than a few minutes ahead. That's simply not true. Evolution and historical knowledge are intertwined with our RNA/DNA more than we know. Citation: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/animal_eqs.php https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/animal_eqs.php We are completely built to live in the moment, if only we are wise enough to learn from the past. Learning when to trust the hairs on the back of the neck perking up for a sense of future danger is important. I've waited tables. I can tell within 15 seconds if you're generous or a cheapskate. The article ends up basically trying to state, clumsily, that we don't live in the moment because we're seeking the meaning of life. You know, Flying Spaghetti Monsters. I guess I'm just surprised this article wasn't the result of a NYT All-Star-Idiot team up of Brooks & Friedman. This kind of smells like their brand of shitty intellectual posturing.
- ghthor 9y ago
  I bet dolphins have the same ability or maybe even something different, even more strange. Perhaps you're the type of person that's in a meditative state all day, living in the moment. Perhaps you were just so good at predicting that you developed the habit of living in the moment instead of in your imagination because you understood how futile it was to entertain such non-sense. We do have mechanisms in our brains that live in the moment all the time. Our brain is a conglomerate of brains we've inherited through evolution. The ancient parts of our brains can hijack our neocortex at the sign of danger or discomfort(adrenaline rush), sexual arousal, empathy, etc. Everyone has different experiences and different levels of understanding of there lives. From my experience many of my acquaintances suffer from not living in the moment. They are off entertaining from fantasy or problem and might endanger someone with their body(bumping or walking into someone). Or the worst case someone absorbed with anxiety or depression about what's going to happen next in their lives and a feeling they have no control over the outcome. I'd say most of my knowledge about our brains comes from the machine intelligence research of Jeff Hawkins. His research of the neocortex I'd say supports this prediction heavy model of our brains.
- nnq 9y ago
blubb-fish 9y ago
we aren't built to juggle three balls either. but it can be learned and it's worth it.
lettersdigits 9y ago
> You know how I can smell bullshit in this article? Yes, by the domain. no need to even read the article or load the web page
- visvavasu 9y ago
  Thanks
- nnq 9y ago
  ...but, why? I'm not an american, and I can see from an ocean away (pun intended) that they're incredibly politically biased, but once you ignore their political stance, the actual content of their articles is very good and insightful. Yeah, titles are click-baity, but so is everything else today, and you may have to skip reading their first intro paragraph and their last conclusions one (heh, I sometimes do this even when reading "unbiased" academic papers, to form my own opinion and not get infected with the one of the authoring researcher, so no biggie here), but "the meat" of their articles is darn good!
- dang 9y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386069 and marked it off-topic.
raverbashing 9y ago
I might agree with the conclusion, but I mostly disagree with the rest Humans making plans? Religion? That came as an afterthought and it's mostly forced through society (living the moment). Most people, most of the time will do what gives them pleasure right now instead of what might give them a reward later on. One just needs to look at obesity/lack of exercise/smoking, those are big problems. The past is important, because all the predictions we do are based on past experiences even if there might be some random factor. Even artificial neural networks learn with time and what happened in the past is ingrained onto them. Thinking about the future is certainly good but unless people fix their mistakes the outcome will be the same
tim333 9y ago
Vaguely related: I've been experimenting with positive visualisation - you picture yourself in the future achieving something or other. I think it may help focus the brains pondering / neural pattern recognition on positive stuff rather than what junk's on TV etc.
- matt4077 9y ago
  I've always been extremely sceptical of the "positive thinking" school of thought. Not only were there quite a few studies showing no or negative effects, I just can't get over the mental image of some car salesman screaming "You can do it" at his mirror every morning.
  - tim333 9y ago
    I'm a little skeptical too although it seems to work for sports planning physical movements. The other stuff I'm not so sure.
psyc 9y ago
That's why so many people train the ability.
owenversteeg 9y ago
Huh, this sounds interesting. I wonder how often people were pinged during the day? Anyone want to go find the study? > The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications. > When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.
- matt4077 9y ago
  You can do more than read the study, become a part of it: https://www.trackyourhappiness.org https://www.trackyourhappiness.org
  - kevingrahl 9y ago
    I feel like this is something where I should probably read the whole Privacy Policy and possibly the ToS before using it at all.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
krosaen 9y ago
A lot of interesting points made in this article, but the assertion that trauma plays only a minor role in depression, made in passing, raised an eyebrow. There's quite a bit of evidence that coming to terms with trauma, can be key for some. Trauma is of course related to imagining the future, and the therapies involved are aimed at resolving the haunting past so you can engage with the present and future unfettered, but it's not like you can tell someone with PTSD to just look to the future more positively.
mrkgnao 9y ago
The comments on this remind me of the somewhat-related koan (from the Jargon File?) about how an apprentice tried to randomize the weights on a neural network to "rid it of preconceptions", and the master responded by closing his eyes "so that the room would be empty".
irickt 9y ago
On the principal author's site this is referred to as the "foundational paper": https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych.org/files/pictures/Seligman-et-al_Navigating-into-the-future-2013.pdf https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych....
hypertexthero 9y ago
From the Longnow Foundation’s about page: > Upon moving to New York City, Brian (Eno) found that “here” and “now” meant “this room” and “this five minutes” as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we try to stretch out what people consider as now. — http://longnow.org/about/ http://longnow.org/about/
leoc 9y ago
"We are never living, but hoping to live; and whilst we are always preparing to be happy, it is certain, we never shall be so, if we aspire to no other happiness than what can be enjoyed in this life."
rasengan0 9y ago
Ah, there goes present moment awareness mindfulness and all that ancient millennial rediscovered new age mumbo jumbo. Hey Buddha you ain't all dat! My homo prospection: In their foundational paper,"The authors speculate that prospection ..." that will build up a novel cottage conference, paper, grant, VC money startup generating industry catering to the buzzy AI/ML secular humanism neurotechnopoly crowd starving for some paterno-religio-academic validation. [1] Carrie Fisher echos, 'Damn, we need you more than ever Pope Francis, you are our only hope...' I'd like to think computers are amazin' and my brain ain't one of em' [1] https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych.org/files/pictures/Seligman-et-al_Navigating-into-the-future-2013.pdf https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych....

303 points by rrherr 9y ago

Bullshit. We are built by evolution to live in this particular physical environment and had no trouble living there for last few millions of years or so. What we are not evolved to do is to live in an overpopulated urban areas, forced to wage slavery and to constantly compete for everything, even a place in a subway, while being awashed with emotionally charged verbal and visual bullshit 24h, hipsterism and other forms of idiotic cosplay of unearned success and presumably high social status by each and every one passed by, while being over-regulated by stupid laws imposed on us by a bloated self-serving "government" so even a straight look of contempt at a tasteless, fat woman in some stupid yoga pants would lead to trouble. the Moment has nothing to do with this. It is so called "human society".

ghthor 9y ago
I'm perfectly happy living in one of those urban areas. I speak out when the people around me are doing things that are rude or dangerous or disgusting and then I move on. My actions towards others are intended to avoid causing all the problems you're describing(anxiety, self-doubt, nervousness); hopefully they inspire others to be considerate or change their behavior. The mindfulness skills that cities help cultivate are acceptance and releasing(letting go). If you find yourself constantly angry or stressed or nervous about other people you should probably remove yourself from the situation, relax and let it go. If you aren't prepared for confrontation or are worried about the situation escalating then use the moments before you let it go to come up with other ways to potentially solve the problem. Get crazy with it, like making a bunch of untraceable fliers, or making a long anonymous post to some digital community related to the location or activity. Their are lots of ways to influence how people act in the long term, in the short term direct confrontation almost always works. Situations where you're unable to remove yourself from the area to avoid someone are the worst. This is why performances on the subway piss me off so much, or people ranting about something. I've been making a point to directly confront anyone doing anything that makes me uncomfortable on the subway and tell them why it makes me uncomfortable and that they need to stop. Just today some women came on the train and started yelling about eating a plant based diet, how it was good for the planet. I agree with her and I'm on and off vegan, but it's NOT fucking cool to start yelling on the subway unless you're getting violated by someone or you're in danger. I snapped her with my spectacles repeating, "ma'am, would you stop yelling on the train", ending with, "You're making all vegans look bad." She did finally stop
- crush-n-spread 9y ago
  I think the point is not that humans can learn to cope with urban environments, like you suggest - The point is that humans weren't meant to live in them. Everything the parent poster says is true, and you're just saying "Humans can get to a point where it's tolerable." I for one think I should not have a verbal and visual barrage of bullshit hit me with full force everyday, powered by the interests of multinational tech companies or governments. Peace and quiet is something that should be treasured, not lost and then made up for with mental tricks.
  - workerIbe 9y ago
    Funny, at any moment I might agree with each of you. One moment (actually a few days) I will dream of a simpler time or maybe some post apocalyptic future another I am soaking in the barrage quite amused by it and the puzzle of it's purpose and yet another influencing and enjoying those around me. I have no plan ( more than a few days), I live in the moment.
  - Banthum 9y ago
    You could consider going to live in a rural area and getting a simpler job. It's a real option and many people choose it.
    - crush-n-spread 9y ago
      I appreciate the suggestion. I am 22 and happened to grow up in a very small town of ~400 people without internet until I was 16. I moved to the city to get software work and I will stay here for the rest of my life. So I guess I'm a hypocrite.
  - ghthor 9y ago
    I agree. My long term plan with my life is to acquire the wealth and knowledge to build and maintain my own life using permaculture. I'd say I agree with you and the thread OP that we weren't made to live in these nasty, dirty, stressing urban environments. My main point is that the knowledge in this article arms you with the idea that you can cope and live within these non-humane environments by basically hacking your brain(avoiding negative prediction paths). You could call it raising your awareness to a higher level of consciousness. So, while you still might notice from time to time someone is doing something gross or that would annoy you, you no longer focus on it. You let it go, you focus on something else, your breathe, your balance, what you making for dinner, how much you love someone, how bad our infrastructure is, how to solve that problem at work, how not to solve that problem at work, how did that nasty ass smear get on the subway door's window?
ucontrol 9y ago
In my opinion, many people make this mistake by believing that just because we've evolved to live a certain lifestyle (the example being pre-civilization hunter-gatherer societies) - that this way of life is indisputably the most comfortable and natural way for us to live, and that deviating from this lifestyle in any way is almost always detrimental. In other words, they fail to take into consideration that reduction of challenge (e.g. through technological means) is also change in everyday behavior that deviates from the "orthodox" way of living, but nevertheless it makes life much better. We don't live how our bodies intended to live, and prehistoric behaviors are no longer practiced - but the fact that there is no need anymore to exercise this sort of behavior is a good thing, since the necessity to do so implied struggle, discomfort and scarcity - all unfavorable circumstance. In short - living as nature intended implied struggle, and the cessation of that way of life is in many ways a result of removal of struggle, and not necessarily just some "unorthodox" living that allegedly puts our being under unnaturally high amounts stress. My point: Yes, the contemporary lifestyle is stressful, and yes it is very different from the way we've evolved to live, but it's probably still much more comfortable and enjoyable than any aboriginal circumstance and prehistoric way of life our ancestors found themselves in.
- ghthor 9y ago
  I'd argue that some of our ancestors lived in quite egalitarian groups of abundance even without the technology we have today; And conversely our world today is drive by inequality and scarcity despite our amazing technology. What technology has really given us is security. The paradise of our ancestors could have been ruined by disease or famine caused by the climate changing or and unexpected flood. Or just a new group of predators moving into the region making it dangerous or killing off the prime game food for the tribe. Our technology and knowledge provides us security and foresight so we're able to move or stockpile or even invent new technology to avoid catastrophes. Sadly, here we are faced with the total disruption of our biosphere and we're having trouble not fucking it up. One, I believe people feel this way about our ancestors because of the feelings one experiences when they really visit and listen to nature. I for one can almost solve any emotional problems with a good walk in the woods. This feeling drives our awareness of the discomfort that our civilization shoves down our throat everyday. We've used technology to simplify our lives and complicate our lives. Right now I think we've complicated our individual lives quite a lot, but with that complication comes a security that someone else did enough work that I can get something eat tomorrow.

ktRolster 9y ago

I wasn't 'built' to type letters.

tambourine_man 9y ago
Well, we built the device you type them on to fit our body, not the other way around.
- ghthor 9y ago
  We did a poor job of "fitting" it to our body and I personally fear RSI pains every week due to how unfit our human-computer interfaces are. My dream is that room-scale VR will become a productive way to perform my job(designing, communicating and writing software) so that I'm up and moving around throughout the whole work day, arms and all, no long stretches of time in the same potentially tension producing position.

pbw 9y ago

This is a decent article but I strongly dislike the title. The phrasing "we aren't built for" is so pessimistic, as if being mindful (living in the moment) is hopeless or unachievable, or even undesirable or harmful. Thousands of years of meditation practices have proven that living in the moment is very possible. Yes our brains are constantly planning and scheming and trying to derail us, but this can be addressed with a modest amount of deliberate practice. Perhaps imagining the future is emblematic of humans, and maybe that has developed over the last 2 million years, but animals have been around 300 million years, and they are (presumably) quite adept at living in the moment. We can be as well. Striving towards that goal is very beneficial and rewarding. One entry point to meditation is Sam Harris's book Waking Up which I describe here: http://www.kmeme.com/2016/07/waking-up.html http://www.kmeme.com/2016/07/waking-up.html

ghthor 9y ago
I almost didn't read the article because of the title. As a avid practitioner of mindfulness meditation, I was turned off, "That's horseshit, being in the moment is what makes me happy and keeps me safe!" But after reading the article this just reinforces why meditation is so good at resolving anxiety and depression. Our brains AREN'T good at living in the moment, they are good at making predictions. Mediation is the process by which we LET GO and try to only OBSERVE the wild prediction process going on in our heads. Understanding this makes the article only reinforce the notion that meditation is so healthy for us as it teaches us to step away from our predictions before they spiral into depression or general anxiety disorder.
- geomark 9y ago
  Indeed. That ttle broadcasts the message that "I don't meditate and I have no clue what it's about."
- derrida 9y ago
  Once about half a month into a retreat, I was staring at blank space in a hut in the middle of the forrest, constantly distracted by fantasies of "a better blank space" - perhaps a nice cave with a walk in, or how I could make a little hut at home and go there every morning. It seems like once I had let go of everything, the mind even had a tendency to want to imagine better blank spaces. lol. The cases of people fantasising about better houses or cars are easy to see, but the fact that I saw it's possible the human mind can do this with blank space means it can do it with anything. :) It's just human nature. Denying things like this can create shadows and so on :) Saying this though, it's watching the mind. We aren't built to live in the moment, but never the less, something can see this! Something watches all this going on in the mind! What is that? Mostly we make a 'home' in attention and identify as our attention. But whatever was seeing 'me' fantasising about nice little architectural meditation huts in the middle of the forrest, that was indistinguishable from objective reality.

RichardHeart 9y ago

"Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it." Lots of things weren't possible, until they were. Focusing on paths towards a goal beats focusing on paths towards failure. Not focusing on death =/= not focusing on living. Healthspan is one of the easiest things to increase, and has hundreds of millions of people doing it whether they're aware of it or not, anyone that eats well or exercises is pro-longevity whether they realize it or not :) That could be considered anti-death behavior, without any need to focus on death at all.

ghthor 9y ago

Hits the nail on the head. Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks that are consistently making predictions about the next input in the stream of input signals as it changes over time. When the prediction results are correct we save a fuzzy recording of the higher-order-pattern that resulted in our correct prediction. Each time our predictions are correct that "memory" is reinforced so we're able to make faster predictions, at earlier points in the pattern. I hypothesize that the source of most anxiety or nervousness stems from our brains making no correct predictions in that moment. This is supported anecdotally by my patterns for overcoming social interactions that used to make me anxious that I've now become comfortable with. My brain now makes enough correct predictions that I don't feel the need to leave the situation. I hypothesize that part of why I started acting on my transgender feelings was because I'd become so uncomfortable in my own body that my brain wasn't able to make accurate predictions about the sensations coming from my within. This is supported anecdotally by the following. I started 2 activities when I accepted my desire to transition to female. Both were touted at reducing the feelings of un-comfortableness in my own body. Female to Male hormone therapy and taijiquan. Both produced lots of new feelings for my brain. Both gave me a sense of agency over my own body, the understanding that I have the ability to shape my body into what I want. In the end I stopped transitioning because taking the hormones(mostly the T blocker) isn't known to be healthy for the body(Liver/Kidneys). Taijiquan is almost unanimously a positive source of change in ones health for the rest of their lives therefore I choose taijiquan and a long healthy life over my desires to have female genitals. Practicing Taijiquan makes me feel better, and in regards to my gender dysphoria taijiquan has cured it; I am very comfortable with my male genitals now that I'm able to make enough consistent predictions during sex to remain engaged with the situation and remain turned on. Edit Addition: I'd like to state that I still identify as a cross dresser and I'm comfortable saying that love certain parts/styles of womens fashion and accessories. Example, I love long flowing skirts. As a society I feel we should reassess men wearing skirts as it is much healthier for our genitals.

johndotsun 9y ago
>Hits the nail on the head. Our brains are back propagating, recursive neural networks that are consistently making predictions about the next input in the stream of input signals as it changes over time. When the prediction results are correct we save a fuzzy recording of the higher-order-pattern that resulted in our correct prediction. Each time our predictions are correct that "memory" is reinforced so we're able to make faster predictions, at earlier points in the pattern. I'm not sure that I could ever be so confident in anything as you are to be stating so unequivocally how the brain works given the track record of previous attempts to model brain function and the current state of neuroscience.

runeks 9y ago

Just because it has been an evolutionary advantage for our mind to be constantly active, doesn't mean that this can't change. That's the point of evolution: we adapt to what's necessary and, for millions of years, constant thought was the factor that made us smarter than everyone else, and the humans in whom this didn't occur weren't smart enough, thus their genes disappeared from the gene pool. This, however, doesn't mean we can't keep evolving towards a state of consciousness where constant thought isn't required, it just means that -- as is always the case -- existence is challenging, because there's millions of years of inertia behind the mind. It has a strong pull, because it was needed for survival. But we can keep evolving. It doesn't need to continue like this forever. It just means that, as opposed to earlier, the people in whom thought is too strong and uncontrollable are now the ones whose genes are removed from the gene pool, through mental illness and anxiety. If you're willing to spend some time watching your mind, you'll realize that it already stops all the time, it's just a matter of noticing this, thus strengthening its absence. But don't expect there to be a button to push to make it stop. It was needed for survival, so its cessation has become associated with fear. But, while you are conscious of this fact, it's not a problem, just a challenge.

solipsism 9y ago
But we can keep evolving. By what mechanism? Evolution doesn't come about by sheer will.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
  True. Motivation is only one component of our perceptual sets. We also have to leverage our emotions, beliefs, and actions to align them with the motivation of evolving. Edit: Anyone care to suggest a reason why this comment's being downvoted?
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    Choosing the right actions is dependent on how you want to evolve. The right emotion is going to be joy. The only belief needed is that you can evolve in the way you want to. Also need to abandon beliefs to the contrary.

gallerdude 9y ago

Off topic: I love all the great longform NYT stuff HN posts, but can never find it on my own - where can I find it on my own?

zachrose 9y ago
Long-form NYT stuff is generally in the NYT Sunday Magazine (and its online equivalent).
- gallerdude 9y ago
  Thanks!
  - tim333 9y ago
    See also: https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-york-times-magazine https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-york-times-mag... and similar

mattbgates 9y ago

We weren't built to pay taxes... but for some reason, someone thought it was a good idea and everyone else followed suit.

Banthum 9y ago
In fairness, we were "built to" live in social structures and dominance hierarchies. We were "built to" socially pool resources and act collectively. Taxes are just part of a really advanced system for doing that. There are groups of people who don't do taxes at all, but you probably don't want to live among them.
eksemplar 9y ago
Yes we were. Even the earliest hunter gatherers shared their bounty with the tribe.
mattbgates 9y ago
To clarify with the people who feel that we were built to pay taxes: it is not to say that we shouldn't help others and even establish forms of law and government and pay our dues. The social contract affirms that we must do this and it isn't free. So we must be willing to pay something "into the system" to have this. It is the fact that... how much in taxes do we have to pay until enough is enough? Our paychecks are taxed. Our toilet paper and food is taxed. Everything in life is taxed and even our deaths, at least our estates, are taxed. We weren't born or built to do this. This is an enforcement upon us that we agreed upon and we continue to do in order to live in the "social contract". We continuously feed this unending hungry greed money machine and "this is the way it is." Of course, there are people who "live off the grid" and found their way to pay nothing. There are also rich people who prefer to pay other people to find loopholes in order to avoid paying taxes too.
- Bakary 9y ago
  I feel like you may be underestimating the value of this social contract. The convenience of the rule of law and developed comfort only really become apparent once they are gone.

gallerdude 9y ago

I do wonder where this fits in with meditation. Perhaps it's "clearing the cache," letting us re-explore options.

ghthor 9y ago
Clearing the cache of possible timelines seems possible. Also filtering out input, what to focus on and what to ignore. Meditation also opens up new pathways of input from our senses, or guides us to existing pathways that we'd never noticed is a better way to express that. New input gives us new places to start predicting from.
ioddly 9y ago
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 Saying "built to" is a pretty strong statement. Constructing narratives about the future is one thing the human mind can do, and is clearly advantageous. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else is another.

gosheroo 9y ago

'Living in the moment' is a metaphor. Thoughts about the future always take place in the present.

gerbilly 9y ago
Exactly this! I'd also point out that thoughts of the past always occur in the present as well. And remembering something is not like replaying a movie, but every time you revisit a memory you change it a bit based on your current state. Remembering is an active process.
- gosheroo 9y ago
  Yes indeed, including in some cases changing the temporal order of events based on reason or new data. For example, I once misheard a drinking mug shatter on the floor before it slid off the kitchen surface. But reason corrected the memory. https://hilo.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/310-Dennett-MultiDrafts.htm https://hilo.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/310-Dennett-MultiDrafts.... I'd like to add that I think 'living in the moment' is powerful and useful despite not being literally true because it points to something real and important.
  - gerbilly 9y ago
    Well the term 'living in the moment' is just a western paraphrasing of the much more subtle and thorough explanation of mindfulness in the original suttas.

jashper 9y ago

To think that our achievement was singular, is rather disappointing.

ddmma 9y ago

We're like a little scared squirrel that looks back and forth not having the capacity to understand and enjoy 'this' moment. I guess is because of how we perceive time and what we can do about it.

nebabyte 9y ago

Not according to Google [0]! Given their pitch to advertisers, we are built exactly to live in "moments" - all conveniently full of advertising opportunities ;) Depends on who you ask, I suppose. lol [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=cplXL-E1ioA https://youtube.com/watch?v=cplXL-E1ioA

suneilp 9y ago

This makes a lot of assumptions, like we know what really went on in the minds of our primitive ancestor's. Meditation, yoga, and martial arts has taught me that being in the moment actually makes prospecting easier and better. Not to mention the stress/anxiety relief, being better connected socially, etc. We've built up a lot of mental constructs over the millennia. These constructs are things like how we're taught to react/respond to various stimuli like emotions from ourselves and others. We're taught these by parents and society. And we constantly refine them for better or worse. There is so much going in this hyperconnected society that being in the moment has become hard and/or harder to maintain.

ghthor 9y ago
Perhaps being in the moment allows are prospecting to consistently start from reality. Where if your lost in a maze of possible futures it's easy to keep going to different starting points and generating lots of trash timelines. Where if you are starting your imagination from this moment right now the tree is shorter and more grounded in reality.

pdog 9y ago

What uniquely distinguishes our species, more than anything else, is our ability to tell stories. From hunting a mammoth to constructing an atomic device, everything depends on our ability to believe in a common story.

6stringmerc 9y ago
Ever have a dream where you were in the past, like hunting or being chased or something? We pass on more than we recognize, I think. Hence consistent fear of heights and/or spiders.
chillacy 9y ago
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. We tell stories about ourselves and call it our identity. Often, we believe so strongly in our identities that we've killed for them or have been killed for them. One person can have one identity where they're a failure, then through therapy, they change their story and become happier. Same events, different story. There's also the cultural story: we descended from these people, we share an intellectual lineage with those people, these are the past events that are important, and this is what they reveal about us, etc.
- l33tbro 9y ago
  Sounds like you may be interested in reading Professor Dan McAdams and the general field of narrative psychology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_psychology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_psychology

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bananaXbanana 9y ago
What a useless comment. This section is to discuss the article, not your little anecdotes, predispositions and especially not for some random spam.
mbrock 9y ago
Here's a quote from your page: "There is nothing that is that important. As long as you believe this or that is so important, you are caught up in playing a game." Here's a quote from the article that you didn't read: "Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead." One of those is nihilistic...

6stringmerc 9y ago

You know how I can smell bullshit in this article? Right here: >Some of our unconscious powers of prospection are shared by animals, but hardly any other creatures are capable of thinking more than a few minutes ahead. That's simply not true. Evolution and historical knowledge are intertwined with our RNA/DNA more than we know. Citation: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/animal_eqs.php https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/animal_eqs.php We are completely built to live in the moment, if only we are wise enough to learn from the past. Learning when to trust the hairs on the back of the neck perking up for a sense of future danger is important. I've waited tables. I can tell within 15 seconds if you're generous or a cheapskate. The article ends up basically trying to state, clumsily, that we don't live in the moment because we're seeking the meaning of life. You know, Flying Spaghetti Monsters. I guess I'm just surprised this article wasn't the result of a NYT All-Star-Idiot team up of Brooks & Friedman. This kind of smells like their brand of shitty intellectual posturing.

ghthor 9y ago
I bet dolphins have the same ability or maybe even something different, even more strange. Perhaps you're the type of person that's in a meditative state all day, living in the moment. Perhaps you were just so good at predicting that you developed the habit of living in the moment instead of in your imagination because you understood how futile it was to entertain such non-sense. We do have mechanisms in our brains that live in the moment all the time. Our brain is a conglomerate of brains we've inherited through evolution. The ancient parts of our brains can hijack our neocortex at the sign of danger or discomfort(adrenaline rush), sexual arousal, empathy, etc. Everyone has different experiences and different levels of understanding of there lives. From my experience many of my acquaintances suffer from not living in the moment. They are off entertaining from fantasy or problem and might endanger someone with their body(bumping or walking into someone). Or the worst case someone absorbed with anxiety or depression about what's going to happen next in their lives and a feeling they have no control over the outcome. I'd say most of my knowledge about our brains comes from the machine intelligence research of Jeff Hawkins. His research of the neocortex I'd say supports this prediction heavy model of our brains.
nnq 9y ago

blubb-fish 9y ago

we aren't built to juggle three balls either. but it can be learned and it's worth it.

lettersdigits 9y ago

> You know how I can smell bullshit in this article? Yes, by the domain. no need to even read the article or load the web page

visvavasu 9y ago
Thanks
nnq 9y ago
...but, why? I'm not an american, and I can see from an ocean away (pun intended) that they're incredibly politically biased, but once you ignore their political stance, the actual content of their articles is very good and insightful. Yeah, titles are click-baity, but so is everything else today, and you may have to skip reading their first intro paragraph and their last conclusions one (heh, I sometimes do this even when reading "unbiased" academic papers, to form my own opinion and not get infected with the one of the authoring researcher, so no biggie here), but "the meat" of their articles is darn good!
dang 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386069 and marked it off-topic.

raverbashing 9y ago

I might agree with the conclusion, but I mostly disagree with the rest Humans making plans? Religion? That came as an afterthought and it's mostly forced through society (living the moment). Most people, most of the time will do what gives them pleasure right now instead of what might give them a reward later on. One just needs to look at obesity/lack of exercise/smoking, those are big problems. The past is important, because all the predictions we do are based on past experiences even if there might be some random factor. Even artificial neural networks learn with time and what happened in the past is ingrained onto them. Thinking about the future is certainly good but unless people fix their mistakes the outcome will be the same

tim333 9y ago

Vaguely related: I've been experimenting with positive visualisation - you picture yourself in the future achieving something or other. I think it may help focus the brains pondering / neural pattern recognition on positive stuff rather than what junk's on TV etc.

matt4077 9y ago
I've always been extremely sceptical of the "positive thinking" school of thought. Not only were there quite a few studies showing no or negative effects, I just can't get over the mental image of some car salesman screaming "You can do it" at his mirror every morning.
- tim333 9y ago
  I'm a little skeptical too although it seems to work for sports planning physical movements. The other stuff I'm not so sure.

psyc 9y ago

That's why so many people train the ability.

owenversteeg 9y ago

Huh, this sounds interesting. I wonder how often people were pinged during the day? Anyone want to go find the study? > The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications. > When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.

matt4077 9y ago
You can do more than read the study, become a part of it: https://www.trackyourhappiness.org https://www.trackyourhappiness.org
- kevingrahl 9y ago
  I feel like this is something where I should probably read the whole Privacy Policy and possibly the ToS before using it at all.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

krosaen 9y ago

A lot of interesting points made in this article, but the assertion that trauma plays only a minor role in depression, made in passing, raised an eyebrow. There's quite a bit of evidence that coming to terms with trauma, can be key for some. Trauma is of course related to imagining the future, and the therapies involved are aimed at resolving the haunting past so you can engage with the present and future unfettered, but it's not like you can tell someone with PTSD to just look to the future more positively.

mrkgnao 9y ago

The comments on this remind me of the somewhat-related koan (from the Jargon File?) about how an apprentice tried to randomize the weights on a neural network to "rid it of preconceptions", and the master responded by closing his eyes "so that the room would be empty".

irickt 9y ago

On the principal author's site this is referred to as the "foundational paper": https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych.org/files/pictures/Seligman-et-al_Navigating-into-the-future-2013.pdf https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych....

hypertexthero 9y ago

From the Longnow Foundation’s about page: > Upon moving to New York City, Brian (Eno) found that “here” and “now” meant “this room” and “this five minutes” as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we try to stretch out what people consider as now. — http://longnow.org/about/ http://longnow.org/about/

leoc 9y ago

"We are never living, but hoping to live; and whilst we are always preparing to be happy, it is certain, we never shall be so, if we aspire to no other happiness than what can be enjoyed in this life."

rasengan0 9y ago

Ah, there goes present moment awareness mindfulness and all that ancient millennial rediscovered new age mumbo jumbo. Hey Buddha you ain't all dat! My homo prospection: In their foundational paper,"The authors speculate that prospection ..." that will build up a novel cottage conference, paper, grant, VC money startup generating industry catering to the buzzy AI/ML secular humanism neurotechnopoly crowd starving for some paterno-religio-academic validation. [1] Carrie Fisher echos, 'Damn, we need you more than ever Pope Francis, you are our only hope...' I'd like to think computers are amazin' and my brain ain't one of em' [1] https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych.org/files/pictures/Seligman-et-al_Navigating-into-the-future-2013.pdf https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/www.prospectivepsych....