Progress and Prospection: Finding Happiness Today by Falling in Love with Your Future
November 2024 Issue
Ryan Meachen, Associate Research Fellow, Leadership & Happiness Laboratory
“The future… exists within the person”, suggested Abraham Maslow, one of pioneers of humanistic psychology, renowned for his research on human potential and self-actualization. Maslow contended that our futures exist within us as dormant potentials, awaiting their progressive actualization. These potential futures existed within our “ideals, hopes, duties, tasks, plans, goals, unrealized potentials, mission, fate, [and] destiny”, each of which orient us towards the future, like the bearings of a compass points us towards North.
Maslow believed that meaningful aspirations are critical facets of psychological health and well-being. In 'Toward a Psychology of Being', Maslow contended, “One for whom no future exists is reduced to the concrete, to hopelessness, to emptiness”. He continues, without meaningful futures to aim for “time must be endlessly ‘filled’… striving, the usual organizer of most activity, when lost, leaves the person unorganized and unintegrated”. In other words, meaningful aspirations are the bearings on our compass that organize our day-to-day activity. Without aspiration we become lost, and our time becomes something to be merely ‘filled’ with petty pleasures and trivial distractions. Aspiration, on the other hand, gives our life a sense of order and intention.
The great physicist Albert Einstein seemed to agree with Maslow too. Einstein contended, “If you would live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things”. Of course, Einstein was not contending that we ought to completely eschew people or things from our life, but to instead have our goals entwined within the people and things the that offer meaning to our life. For example, one’s goal of building a family—as one of the four pillars of happiness—is necessarily tied to developing a loving relationship with a life partner.
Modern scholars have provided support for Maslow and Einstein’s contentions as well, empirically examining the relationship our goals and future aspirations have upon our happiness and well-being. Ed Diener, one of the godfathers of happiness studies, argued that “People react in positive ways when making progress toward goals and react negatively when they fail to achieve goals”. The critical word to stress from Diener is progress. Progress on important goals matters for human happiness. Seeking to realize personally significant ambitions provide our lives with direction, structure and meaning.
These ideas, for some, are self-evident. But we should investigate the underpinnings of this “self-evidence”: why is thinking about our goals and our future so central to our thoughts and our happiness?
Homo Prospectus – Man Who Thinks About the Future
Recent advances in psychology and neuroscience have found that thinking about the future—whether consciously or unconsciously—is one of the chief functions of the human brain. In minds throughout the Western world, roughly two out of every five thoughts focus on the future. Our ability to simulate and evaluate our potential futures—an ability psychologists call prospection—is perhaps the key cognitive ability that distinguishes the human mind from the minds of our distant animal relatives.
As far as we are aware, man is the only animal that contemplates the future. As renowned happiness scholar Daniel Gilbert contends, “the greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future”. Human beings, unlike any other animal, can think about the multiple possible futures branching out from the present moment. We can ‘prospect’ about the potential futures ahead and select the best pathway to tread. It turns out that human beings can time travel, but for now, only within the confines of our minds.
Given our ability to consider the future, Seligman & Tierney assert that we are a misnamed species:
“We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the ‘wise man’, but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? … What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future”.
We are not the wise man homo-sapien; we are homo-prospectus: man who considers the future. Prospection enables us to evaluate and make sense of our past and our present, to better navigate towards the future. Prospection gives us the ability to think about our future and our self across time. We can sample what our potential future might be like by simulating and affectively testing them out in our minds—prospecting ahead about the consequences potential pathways could have upon our happiness if we were to actualize them. As Gilbert and Wilson contend, “we can close our eyes, imagine these events, and pre-experience their hedonic consequences in the here and now”.
Our ability to think about the future prompts us to wonder about own personal fates and fortunes, which decisions to make and which pathways to take. Prospection affords us our intuitive sense of free will, offering the incredible power to think about our ‘self’ across time, and to evaluate and enact upon our possible futures. But, our ability to think about the future also confronts us with an awareness of our own mortality and the ever-shrinking time horizon left in our lives. Finding out what we want to do with our limited days on earth is perhaps one of the most difficult questions we face. Our days pass by one by one—like grains of sand funneling down the hourglass—adding up to the life that we’ve lived.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously proclaimed: “man is condemned to be free… every man, without any support or help whatever, is condemned at every instant to invent man”. Perhaps our awareness of our future, our mortality, and our limited time on earth sheds light on why, in Sartre’s eyes, our freedom is simultaneously our condemnation. Each grain of sand trickling down the hourglass represents a moment of choice, confronting us with the question of how to meaningfully spend each passing grain of time. Each grain adds up to shape the life we live and the person we become. This is at once an existentially terrifying and hopeful idea.
On Possible Selves – Images of Who We Might Become
For many developmental psychologists, the search for who we wish to become is an essential crossroad in human development. Maslow contended that each of us have a deep innate need for self-actualization—to realize our innate potential and become our unique self. The great psychoanalyst Erik Erikson recognized that many people begin to ponder these matters in their adolescence and early adulthood. Asking questions like, ‘who am I?’, or ‘who may I become?’, marks the beginning of our own personal journey in search for a self worthy of becoming. We all face the question of what we want to be when we grow up, and part of the difficulty is sifting through the many possibilities before us.
To make sense of these possibilities, Markus & Nurius introduced the concept of ‘possible selves’ to psychology. Possible selves are the mental images we have of our potential and who we may be in the future. Psychologists have outlined a number of types of possible selves that individuals use as self-guides, or standards for whom they might become in the future. Each of these possible selves are usually used as a contrast against one’s real self (also referred to as the current self, or actual self). Your real self is your evaluation of who you are now—your traits, behaviours, and habits that shape who you. It is a realistic assessment of the person you are today. Possible selves, on the other hand, helps us make sense of who we could be in the tomorrows to come.
While I won’t offer an exhaustive list of all the possible selves found across the psychological literature, common forms individuals use to think about their future include:
The Feared Self: This is the future self that you are most afraid of becoming. It includes all the characteristics you hope to avoid embodying, and the type of person you hope to avoid being. The feared self has been recognized by scholars as a powerful catalyst for behaviour change, acting as an important ‘avoidance’ motive, orientating individuals away from the self that they wish to avoid becoming.
The prospect of becoming one’s feared self is commonly developed through salient life experiences or personal failures that one wishes to steer clear of experiencing again. For example, one’s feared self may stem from the desire to avoid becoming anything like a family member who had a negative impact upon the individual growing up—like an alcoholic father—serving as a role model of who one wishes not to be. Thus, the feared self becomes tied to avoiding any behaviours or situations that lead the individual towards becoming anything like their feared self.
Another example may be a feared self emerging from a series of interconnected personal failures. While a single failure may not be a sufficient enough catalyst to evoke deep personal reflection and transformation, a pattern of connected failures can cause the individual to reappraise their current self to avoid further failure in the future. Roy Baumeister calls this sense of dissatisfaction and failure in life the "crystallization of discontent”. The prospect of an undesirable future crystallizes into an image of one’s feared self, serving as a negative standard that one wishes to avoid becoming.
The Ought Self: This is the future self you think you should be, based on expectations and obligations imposed by external others, such as society, family, or cultural norms. It’s the qualities you believe you ought to possess, the duties you think you ought to fulfil, and the person you ought to become in order to please others.
Throughout our lives we are met with a barrage of ought selves. Ought selves can be imposed upon us by our own society or culture. They can also be placed on our shoulders by well-intended individuals who are important to us, like a parent or grandparent. In wanting to live up to the expectations of our culture or our loved ones, individuals will often amend their personal aspirations in order to live up to the wishes of others. But this usually comes at the cost of following and living out our own dreams, which can lead to stifling our own well-being over time.
This is not to say that the expectations of others should be blindly cast aside in favor of our own dreams. Of course not. Human beings are social creatures who flourish by living in relationship to others. Yet it’s worth considering who we wish to be for significant others, rather than blindly living up to who others wish we should become.
The Ideal Self: This is who you dream of being. Your ideal self is the version of you that has all the qualities you wish to have, has achieved the things you aspire to achieve, and is contributing to the world in the way you find personally meaningful. It's your personal vision of who you could become if you were fulfilling your potential—drawing on your personal ambitions, your values, your purpose and callings.
The ideal self can serve as a powerful catalyst for personal change and growth, one that rouses us forward to actualize our desired future. According to Professor Richard Boyatzis, acting in accordance with realizing one’s ideal self “ensures deeper self-satisfaction… [and] the emergence of a new state of being with self-actualization as a core quality”. Following this contention, one route towards making progress on personally significant ambitions, fulfilling your potential, and self-actualization may come from using your ideal self as your guiding light. What matters then, is using your day-to-day moments in service of becoming (or to maintain being) your ideal self.
The Ideal Self and the Actualization of Human Potential
A number of psychologists have implied that developing a resonant vision of your ideal self is an essential passage for personal growth and the actualization of potential. Ellis Paul Torrance (1983), one of the early pioneers of creativity research, heralded the crucial role that “falling in love with something… an image of the future” plays in catalyzing creative achievement and the realization of human potential. Following his 30-year longitudinal study of human development and creativity, Torrance argues that developing a resonant image of the future is critical for realizing our potential:
“My experience and research have increasingly made me aware of the dreadful importance of falling in love with “something” – a dream, an image of the future. I am convinced that the driving force behind future accomplishments is the image of the future of people. Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force. These images of the future draw us on and energize us. Giving us the courage and will to take important initiatives and move forward to new solutions and achievements. To dream and to plan, to be curious about the future and to wonder how much it can be influenced by our efforts are important aspects of our being human. In fact, life’s most energizing and exciting moments occur in those split seconds when our struggling and searching are suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new, an image of the future.”.
Similar to Torrance, Daniel Levinson—author of ‘The Seasons of a Man’s Life’—argued that developing a ‘Dream’ and placing it on the horizon of one’s life is one of the major tasks of early adult development. For Levinson, ‘the Dream’ is an image of who one may become in adulthood. It often begins as a vague idea and only distally connected to one’s life in the present. The key developmental task, however, was for the individual to gradually define their ‘Dream’ with greater clarity and precision, and then, find the ways by which they could begin to live it out (Levinson, 1978).
One of the biggest dangers for the emergence of our ideal self is the tyrrany of the ought self. This tyranny comes when the self we seek to become is shaped by external pressures from the outside world rather than our own aspirations. One of the critical conflicts we must face, then, is tending to the whispers of our ideal self amidst the blaring barrage of loud oughts and expectations from the world around us. The oughts selves imposed on individuals is perhaps the largest obstacle for individuals seeking to develop their own ideal self; our ‘dreams’ can be easily drowned out by the noise of outside oughts.
According to the German psychoanalyst, Karen Horney, one of the tells for whether we’re striving towards an ‘ought self’ instead our own ‘ideal’, is when we become obsessed with our own “search for glory”. Our dreams of who we could be in the future become mere vehicles for attaining external markers of success; akin to Professor Arthur Brooks’ notion of the four false idols— - money, power, pleasure, and prestige— – that distract us from authentic happiness. Beware of shiny distractions that deter us from our ‘Dream’.
Interestingly enough, research examining Levinson’s ideas has shown that the mere presence of having a personal ‘Dream’ predicts life satisfaction among 28-year-olds. Other research on the psychology of inspiration suggests that having a resonant ‘Dream’ of the future can promote well-being and elicit feelings of transcendence. Feelings of transcendence connect people to something larger than themselves, and offering a meaningful North Star to live out. Indeed, as Viktor Frankl contends, self-actualization may only be attainable as an unintended consequence of self-transcendence.
Happiness in the Present & the Future
Now, this is not to say that we ought to focus blindly on actualizing a distant future, and that we should put off our happiness until a tomorrow that never comes. Quite the contrary. Our happiness is contingent on our ability to balance living in the present with striving towards a meaningful future. In fact, the most promising avenues for sustainable happiness provide fulfilment in the present moment, and foster opportunities for fulfilment in the future to come. Striving towards fulfilment in a far-off future by suffering through our present day is a poor recipe for sustainable happiness. As Professor Arthur Brooks argues in From Strength to Strength:
“Fulfilment cannot come when the present moment is little more than a struggle to bear in order to attain the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives”.
One of the essential macro-nutrients of happiness is satisfaction; or, as we heard from Ed Diener, from “making progress toward goals”. Happiness is not reserved for the moment of glory that comes at the summit of the mountain; deep-seated, sustainable happiness comes from the journey toward a meaningful destination. It comes from the satisfaction of the climb. It comes from the satisfaction of the self-in-action; becoming the person you want to be in the future.
Here’s a two-point plan for how we can put this into action.
1. ‘Prospecting’ About Your Ideal Self.
Take 15 minutes away from the hustle and bustle of your usual day. Use this time as a sacred space for thinking about the life you wish to lead and the person you wish to become in the future.
Think about your life 10 to 15 years from now. What would it look like if you were fulfilling your best potentials? Imagine your future prospects have gone as well as you can imagine.
Consider the relationships you will have with people important to you. Think about the work you’re doing, or how you may be contributing to the world around you. Reflect on all the important components that make up your life: your health, your career, your education, your relationships, your spiritual life, your hobbies. Feel free to consider any other areas that are important to the life you want to live.
Get specific about the particular details of the life you are living. Envision the specifics of what living this life would look like. Think about how you would be spending the moments of your days. Make it feel clear and palpable.
As you’re thinking this through, write down the vision that comes to mind. Be as imaginative as you want. This is the vision of the life you wish to live. If you have a penchant for artistic flair, perhaps you’d like to draw a picture of your vision too.
This method is a combination of the ‘best possible self’ exercise from Professor Laura King, and work from Professor Richard Boyatzis on developing your ideal self concept. Research on the ‘best possible self’ exercise has found that undergraduate students who completed the exercise daily for two weeks showed increases in their experience of positive emotions. Students who continued to write about their ‘best possible self’ following the two- week study continued to show increases in their positive emotions a month later.
Envisioning one’s best possible self has been demonstrated to have a number of positive psychological effects, including increases in positive emotion, happiness, social connection and well-being. But despite these benefits, intentional action and progress is necessary if we wish to become our ideal self.
2. Actualize Your Ideal Self. One Day at a Time.
Merely imagining and fantasizing about who we could be in the future isn’t enough for turning our ‘Dream’ into a reality. Instead, we ought to honestly pursue our dreams of the future. First, we must envision our desired future, and then honestly confront our reality.
Confronting reality comes from honestly appraising your real self. That is, by truthfully examining the person you are today, and comparing it against your vision of the person you want to be in the future. This might start with examining your strengths that may help you on your journey ahead towards realizing your ideal self. But equally important, too, is honestly appraising your weaknesses or shortcomings in comparison to the ideal self you seek to become.
The purpose of this exercise is not to encourage self-flagellation or to beat yourself up over your weaknesses, but rather, to find opportunities for your own personal growth in service of becoming your ideal self.
For example, consider the case of a woman whose ideal self is an inspiring educator in their hometown, seeking to help individuals realize their potential and meaningfully contribute to the world. Her real self, however, is currently working a job that feels disconnected from her purpose, with only occasional opportunities to mentor others. She knows she has a lot to offer her community, but she lacks a pathway for making a significant impact.
Through honest self-appraisal, she recognizes her strengths: a deep connection to her community, strong communication skills, and a genuine passion for transformative education and mentoring. At the same time, she recognizes a number of the gaps that hold her back, such as a lack of formal teaching qualifications, limited classroom experience, and difficulty balancing time between professional responsibilities and community involvement.
With this honest assessment, she creates her roadmap for personal growth. She decides to build on her strengths by volunteering at a local youth centre to mentor students, which deepens her community ties, provides hands-on teaching experience, and offers an opportunity for positive impact in the lives of others. To address her weaknesses, she enrols in a part-time education certification program and starts observing seasoned teachers in action to learn effective education strategies. She also prioritizes time management by creating a weekly schedule that balances progress toward realizing her long-term dreams while maintaining her current commitments.
Step by step, day by day, the aspiring educator moves closer to becoming her ideal self. Not just for her own fulfilment and happiness, but in service of empowering young people in her hometown to fulfil their unique potential too.
In order to realize your own dreams and aspirations, it is important that you consider creating your own learning and development plan too. How might you harness your strengths to move closer to becoming your Ideal Self? Consider also attending to 1–2 of your current weaknesses too; what skills do you need to develop to make your dream a reality? The idea here is not a sudden overnight transformation, but instead, to provide a roadmap for meaningfully using each day to progressively become more like your ideal self.
As Maslow says, “The future… exists within the person”. But today, the onus is on us to act it out.
No matter how lofty the mountain on the horizon may be, today is an opportunity for progress towards its summit.
Progress towards meaningful goals is where happiness is found. One day at a time.
Contributing editor: Bryce Fuemmeler