How to Make Friends With a Version of Yourself You've Never Met

Tagline: Your future self is out there right now, living with every financial decision you're making today. The problem? Your brain treats them like a complete stranger.

Episode Summary: Why do smart, caring people consistently fail to save for retirement — even when they know they should? The answer has nothing to do with discipline, and everything to do with neuroscience. Research from UCLA shows that when people imagine their future selves, the part of their brain that activates is the same part that activates when they think about a stranger. Not themselves. A stranger. Today we unpack the psychology of your future self, why your brain is wired to abandon them, and — most importantly — what you can actually do about it. This is one of the most important episodes we've done. And it's also, we promise, a lot of fun.

What You'll Learn:

• The UCLA brain-scan study that changed how behavioral economists think about saving
• What "temporal discounting" is and why it makes your future self's problems feel fake
• Why willpower and discipline are the wrong tools for this problem
• The "Debt to a Stranger" mental model — and why reframing changes behavior
• How Hal Hershfield's future-self research is being used by major financial institutions
• Four concrete, research-backed techniques to build a real relationship with your future self
• Why this is not just a retirement problem — it shows up in health, relationships, and career too

Key Concepts Covered:

• Temporal Discounting (Hyperbolic Discounting)
• Future Self Continuity
• Present Bias
• Empathy Gap (Hot/Cold Empathy Gap)
• Identity-Based Financial Planning
• Pre-commitment Devices (Thaler & Benartzi's Save More Tomorrow)

Research & People Referenced:

• Hal Hershfield, UCLA Anderson School of Management — future self continuity research
• Daniel Goldstein & Hal Hershfield — aged avatar studies
• Richard Thaler & Shlomo Benartzi — Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) program
• Daniel Kahneman — System 1 vs. System 2 thinking
• George Ainslie — hyperbolic discounting
• Walter Mischel — marshmallow test (and the nuanced follow-up research)

Memorable Segments:

• "The Stranger in the MRI" — the brain scan study explained
• "A Letter From 2045" — the future self letter exercise, live
• "The Marshmallow Test Lied to You" — what the follow-up research actually shows
• The $1 vs. $1,000 illustration of hyperbolic discounting

Connect & Resources:

• Try the future self letter exercise and share it with us
• Hal Hershfield's book: Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today

Transcript

Do You Like Your Future Self?

Intro

The Stranger In the MRI

Temporal Discounting

The Marshmallow Test Lied To You

The One Thing

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi everyone, welcome to Personal Finance with Molly, where we talk about all things personal finance. I am your host, Molly Ford Coates. Let's dig in. I want you to do something for me right now. Close your eyes if you can. Obviously, don't close your eyes if you cannot, or you're driving, or anything like that, but if you can, close your eyes or just look away from whatever screen is in front of you. And I want you to picture yourself. Not right now, not today. I want you to picture yourself like 20 years from now or 30 years from now. Pretend it's the year 2045 or 2055. What do you look like? Where do you live? What are you doing on a Tuesday morning? Are you working or retired? Are you healthy? Are you traveling? Do you have more time than you do now or do you have less time? Are you happy? Really try. Get specific. What does the kitchen look like? What does the light feel like coming through the window? Now, here is my question. Do you like that person? Do you feel connected to that person? And do you feel, and I really want you to sit with this word, do you feel responsible for that person? Or do they feel a little bit like a stranger, like someone you've heard about but never actually met? Because here's the thing: your brain has an answer to that question. And the answer, backed by neuroscience and backed by MRI data, that answer is that for most people, that future person feels like exactly that. A stranger. And today we're going to talk about why that's costing you in ways that are measurable and documented and best of all, completely fixable. Let's dig in. Hey friends, welcome back to the show. And today's episode is one of those that I really genuinely feel like will stick with you. Not because it's going to make you feel bad about yourself. We're not doing that here, right? But because it reframes a problem that most of us have been solving wrong our entire adult lives. The problem is this. We know we should save. We know we should invest. We know we should take care of future us. But we don't. Or at least not as much as we should. And the standard explanation for this is that we lack discipline or we lack willpower. We spend too much on lattes. We're addicted to instant gratification. We're, and I've, and I've actually seen this written in serious financial publications, we are morally weak. But friends, I want to push back on that and I want to push back hard because that framing is not only unkind, that framing is also wrong. It misses the actual mechanism. And when you miss the mechanism, you try to fix the wrong thing. The reason you don't adequately save for your future self is not that you're weak, it's that your brain, functioning completely normally, treats your future self as a different person. Someone you don't know, someone you don't have a particular obligation to. And you can fix a relationship problem. Let's go to the science because this is where it genuinely gets wild. In 2009, a researcher named Hal Hirschfield, he was at NYU at the time, now he's at UCLA Anderson, but put he put people in FMRI machines and showed them pictures while scanning their brain activity. He showed them pictures of themselves as they are now. He showed pictures of celebrities who are strangers, and he showed pictures of themselves digitally aged, like their future selves, right? Now, when people looked at pictures of their current selves, the brain regions associated with self-referential processing, those lit up. That's the part of your brain that says, hey, that's me. When they looked at celebrities or at strangers, right, a different region activated. The part associated with thinking about other people. Wanna guess what happened when they looked at their aged future selves? Well, that stranger region lit up. Not the self-region, it was the stranger region. Your future self, neurologically, is not you. It's them, some other person, a hypothetical, somewhat abstract person who happens to share your name and social security number, but does not command the same neurological loyalty as present you. This is not a metaphor. This is not a tendency or a pattern. This is what happens in the brain. The MRI doesn't lie, friends. And here's what Hirschfield found when he correlated this data with financial behavior. The weaker your sense of connection to your future self, what he actually calls future self-continuity, the less you save. The more you engage in behaviors that benefit you now at the expense of you later. And it goes the other way too. People with strong future self-continuity, people who genuinely identify with and feel connected to their older selves, save significantly more, they make healthier choices and report higher life satisfaction. The variable isn't discipline, friends. It's relationship. And here's the good news buried in that. Relationships can be built. That's literally the whole point of today's episode. But first, let's understand why the disconnect exists in the first place. So, there's a concept in behavioral economics called temporal discounting, sometimes called hyperbolic discounting. And it's one of my favorite concepts in this whole field because it explains so much about human behavior in one elegant yet slightly depressing idea. Temporal discounting describes the way we assign less value to rewards the further away they are in time. Which, on the surface, sounds reasonable. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 10 years. That's just inflation, that's real. But the rate at which we discount, it's not rational, it's not linear, it's hyperbolic. Meaning the closer something is to right now, the more we irrationally overvalue it. And the further away it is, the more we irrationally discount it. Here's an illustration. I'll give you a choice. Option A, I give you$100 right now. Option B, I give you$110 in one week. Most people pick option A. You take$100 now over$110 in a week. That's a 10% return in seven days, which is in an annualized return that would make any hedge fund manager weep with joy. And you'd still take$100 now. That's hyperbolic discounting at work. Now, same question, different time frame. Option A,$100 in one year. Or option B, I'll give you$110 in one year and one week. Suddenly, almost everyone picks option B. Of course you'd wait an extra week for$10 when you're already waiting a year, but the math is identical. The decision it has completely flipped. The difference is proximity to now. When now is on the table, our brains treat the immediate reward as almost incomparably more valuable. When both options are in the future, we become perfectly rational. This is why we say we'll start saving next month. Next month sounds fine, plenty of time. But when next month arrives and becomes next month, suddenly it doesn't feel fine at all. Suddenly, right now has all the irrational pull it always had. And here's how this connects to your future self. Your retirement is not next month. It's not next year, it's decades away. Which means, according to your brain's temporal discounting algorithm, it is essentially worthless to think about. And I don't mean this harshly, friends, I don't. That's literally what the math of hyperbolic discounting produces. Events beyond a certain time horizon become so heavily discounted that they're functionally invisible to your decision-making machinery. Your future self doesn't just feel like a stranger, they feel like a stranger who lives on another planet in a different century. No wonder, friends, we don't save enough. Alright, okay, a brief detour here, because I need to address something that a lot of you have probably heard about, and I think it's been used to make people feel terrible about themselves for decades. And you've heard me talk about this in previous episodes as well. It is the marshmallow test. In the 60s and 70s, psychologist Walter Michel ran a series of experiments with young children. He'd put a marshmallow in front, a marshmallow in front of the kid, leave the room, and say, You can eat this now, or if you wait until I come back, you get two marshmallows. Then he followed these kids for decades. And the original finding was dramatic. Kids who waited or who showed willpower, right, went on to have better academic outcomes, they had better health, they had better finances. And the conclusion that the public drew was self-control is a fundamental trait. You either have it or you don't. And if you don't, well, that's a one marshmallow life for you. Except, except, friends, the follow-up research tells a much more complicated story. Later studies found that the marshmallow test was largely measuring something else. It was measuring trust. Children who waited were disproportionately, children who had learned that adults kept their promises. Children who grabbed the marshmallow immediately were disproportionately, were children who had experienced environments where waiting didn't pay off, where promises were broken, where the future was genuinely less reliable. In other words, the children who couldn't wait weren't undisciplined, they were rational, given what their environment had taught them about how the future behaves. Now, friends, this matters enormously for how we think about saving and future self. Because if your life has taught you through economic stability or through a family that never modeled long-term thinking or through a neighborhood where long-term planning genuinely didn't pay off, that the future is unreliable, then discounting it heavily isn't a character flaw, it's adaptive. And the solution to this isn't to try harder, quote unquote. The solution is to change what you believe about the reliability of the future, to build evidence that waiting pays off, to make the future feel real and trustworthy enough to save for. Now, this, friends, this brings me to the good part. All right, so here's the whole point. Four concrete research-backed things you can actually do to build a real relationship for your future self or with your future self. Not abstract advice, real things. Four methods. Method one, write them a letter. Write your future self a letter right now. And this is Hal Hirschfield's most famous recommendation. And it sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but the research behind it is strong. Write a letter to your future self, specifically to the version of you who will exist in 20 or 30 years. Write it in second person. Make it personal. Describe what you hope their life looks like, what you want for them, what you're doing today, right now, what you're doing to make their life better or harder. When you do this, something shifts. You start to develop what psychologists call narrative continuity because you're present between your present and your future self. The future person stops being abstract and starts being someone you're actively in a relationship with, someone you're writing to, someone whose Tuesday morning you have the ability to shape. A study by Hirschfield and his colleagues found that people who wrote these letters subsequently allotted significantly more money to retirement savings than the control groups. The letter made the future feel real. And real things are worth saving for. Here is a short version of what one might sound like, just to make it tangible. Hey, it's 2026, and I'm thinking about you today. I'm really thinking about you. Maybe for the first time. I know I tend to not think about you much. You're so far away, and today is so loud. But I want to tell you, I'm working on it. I set up an automatic contribution this week. It's small, but it's for you. I hope by the time you read this, you're sitting somewhere you love in a life you chose without panic in your chest on Sunday nights. I'm trying to make that possible now. I'm starting today. So, friends, I want you to write your own version. Seriously. Pause this episode and write it. It works. Method two, meet your future self visually. This is the research that genuinely broke the internet when it came out, or at least the academic internet anyway. Hirschfield, along with researcher Daniel Goldstein, ran a study where they showed some participants an age-progressed avatar of themselves, like a digitally aged photo of their own face, before asking them about savings allocations. Another group saw their current face. Another group saw an aged stranger. The group who saw their aged own face allocated dramatically more to retirement savings. In some versions of the study, nearly twice as much. Seeing a version of yourself that looks like your future self, even a computer-generated one, it activated a sense of connection and responsibility that no amount of financial literacy has produced. Today there are apps to do this, right? There's aging filters on your phone, and they do a passable version. If you want a more speci a more sophisticated one, Hirschfield has been involved in tools embedded in financial services platforms. But here's the simple version. Find a photo of an older relative that you resemble, like maybe a parent or an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent. Put it somewhere you see regularly. Not as a scare tactic, right? We're not doing that. As a reminder, as a relationship cue. That is someone I am responsible for. Method three: pre-commitment devices. Get your future selves back before you change your mind. One of the cleverest applications of future self-research in actual financial products is a program designed by Richard Thaler. Yes, you know, I've talked about him before, and Shlomo Ben Artsi. It's called Save More Tomorrow or SMART. Here's the insight. People find it very hard to commit to saving now, because now is real and the sacrifice is immediate. But people find it much easier to commit to saving in the future because the future is abstract and the sacrifice doesn't sting yet. So save more tomorrow doesn't ask you to save more today. It asks you to commit to automatically increasing your savings rate the next time you get a raise. A portion of the raise goes to savings before it ever touches your lifestyle. You never had it, so you don't miss it. Your current self never sacrifices anything. Your future self gets the benefit. Companies that implemented this program saw employees' savings rates more than triple over four years. The principle that you can apply right now: make commitments about future money, not current money. Sign up today for an automatic contribution increase that kicks in 90 days from now. Promise yourself in writing to your future self-letter that the next time you get a raise, the first thing you do is increase your retirement contribution. You're not asking present you to sacrifice, you're asking future you to not spend the money before you ever had a taste of it. And here's method four. Get specific about who your future self is. And here's a subtler one. This is a subtler one, but research suggests that it's still powerful. Vague future selves are easy to ignore, right? But specific future selves are hard to abandon. Retired me, quote unquote, retired me is abstract. 67-year-old me who wants to spend three months a year in Portugal and not worry about whether the flight is affordable, well, that's not abstract. That person has a flight to catch. That person has a coffee on a specific terrace in Lisbon. That person is waiting for the decisions you make today. The more specific you make your future self's life, where they live, what they do on Tuesdays, what they're proud of, what they don't have to worry about, the stronger your neurological sense of connection is to that person. And the stronger the connection, the more your present-day financial behavior shifts. Vision boards get a lot of mockery, and sometimes it's deserved a little bit, but at their core, vision boards are doing a behavioral science-backed thing, making the abstract future concrete. The execution often gets cheesy, but the instinct is actually correct. So, friends, get specific. Write it down. What does a good day in your future self's life actually look like in detail? So those are the four methods. Method one, write the letter. Write your future self a letter. Method two, meet your future self visually. And method three, do the pre-commitment devices. And method four, get specific. Get specific about who your future self is. Alright, here's your one thing to take from today. Your future self doesn't need you to be more disciplined. They need you to know them. The gap between who you are now and who you're saving for isn't a moral gap. It's a relationship gap. And every relationship starts the same way with an introduction, a little attention, a decision to care. Write the letter, friends. Age the photo, pre-commit to the next raise. Name the Tuesday morning in Lisbon. Make friends with the stranger in the MRI. They have been waiting for you. You got this, friends. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to Personal Finance with Molly. If this episode resonated with you, if it meant something with you, if it shifted anything in you, please share this episode with someone who may need to hear it. And if you're getting value from this podcast where your money, your mindset, and your behavior intersect, please follow the show, leave a review. Send me a message. There is a link in the show notes. Until next time.