Yesterday's Future Is Better Than Tomorrow's Past

Yesterday's Future Is Better Than Tomorrow's Past

About 25 years ago, I wrote a line in a song:

Yesterday's future is better than tomorrow's past.

I wanted people to struggle with it a little.

I still do.

Because yesterday's future and tomorrow's past can be the exact same thing.

Today.

Same day.

Different perspective.

Yesterday, today was something that hadn't happened yet.

Tomorrow, today will be something that already happened.

Right now?

We're living it.

And somehow those three versions of the exact same day may not feel anything alike.

The day you're waiting for

We spend a lot of our lives anticipating things.

The new job.

The promotion.

The vacation.

The house.

The relationship.

The kids growing up.

The business we're going to start.

The thing we're going to build.

Retirement.

Someday.

We imagine these futures before they exist.

We assign value to them.

We make decisions today based on how much we think we'll value them tomorrow.

In a sense, we're constantly building little expected-value models in our heads.

If I do this, then maybe that happens.

If that happens, I'll be happier.

If I can just get there...

There are probabilities attached to those possible futures, whether we acknowledge them or not.

But there's another variable buried in the equation that's considerably harder to estimate:

What will it actually be worth to me if I get there?

Then tomorrow becomes today

Eventually, some of those futures arrive.

The thing we wanted becomes the thing we have.

The job starts.

The vacation happens.

The kids grow up.

The company launches.

Someday becomes Tuesday.

And now something interesting happens.

The future we've been imagining becomes the present we're actually experiencing.

Sometimes it's everything we hoped it would be.

Sometimes it isn't.

Sometimes something we desperately wanted becomes surprisingly ordinary once we have it.

Sometimes something we dreaded becomes unexpectedly meaningful.

Sometimes we're so busy thinking about the next tomorrow that we barely notice yesterday's future has arrived.

This was the thing we were waiting for.

And then today becomes yesterday

Daniel Kahneman made an important distinction between what he called the experiencing self and the remembering self.

The person living an experience and the person remembering that experience don't necessarily evaluate it the same way.

Which makes me wonder whether there's another self standing on the other side.

The anticipating self.

The person imagining the experience before it happens.

Now we have three.

The anticipating self.

The experiencing self.

The remembering self.

And all three can evaluate the exact same day differently.

Yesterday:

I can't wait.

Today:

Is this it?

Tomorrow:

Those were the days.

Same day.

Different perspective.

Different value.

What do you really want?

That's where this starts to make my head hurt.

Because we make decisions with the anticipating self about experiences that will be lived by the experiencing self and eventually judged by the remembering self.

So which one gets to answer:

What do you really want?

That's not as easy a question as it sounds.

Do I want the experience?

The anticipation?

The memory?

The accomplishment?

The recognition?

The money?

The freedom?

The story I'll eventually tell about it?

Do I want something because I genuinely value it – or because I've spent so long pursuing it that I've stopped asking why?

And how would I know?

Our models keep changing

There's a little Bayes in here too.

We make decisions based on what we believe today.

Then something happens.

We learn.

We update.

The next decision should incorporate what the last one taught us.

That's tidy enough when we're updating our estimate of what is likely to happen.

But we're doing something harder at the same time.

We're learning about what we value.

Maybe I correctly predicted the outcome but incorrectly predicted how much I'd enjoy it.

Maybe the thing I thought would make me happy didn't.

Maybe something I never expected to value became incredibly important.

The probability wasn't necessarily wrong.

Maybe my expectation of the value was.

And just to make the whole thing more interesting, the person doing the evaluating is changing too.

The person who wanted something yesterday isn't exactly the same person experiencing it today.

And neither will be exactly the same person remembering it tomorrow.

Good luck putting that into a spreadsheet.

What did you think was going to happen?

There's another place I wrestle with this.

Testing.

Before we test something, we usually have an expectation.

What do we think is going to happen?

Then we run the test.

What happened?

Simple enough.

Except the person evaluating what happened may already have a belief about what was supposed to happen.

Does that matter?

Almost certainly.

If the results confirm what I expected, am I less likely to question them?

If they contradict what I expected, am I more likely to go looking for something wrong?

Do I explain away the unexpected result?

Or stop investigating too soon when I get the answer I was expecting?

Maybe the solution is to give the analysis to someone who knows absolutely nothing about what we expected.

But I'm not sure that's right either.

Because context matters.

Knowing why we expected something to happen helps us understand whether the result makes sense.

It helps us recognize what's surprising.

It helps us know where to look when something doesn't add up.

An analyst who knows nothing about what they're measuring may be less influenced by expectations.

But are they more objective?

Or merely less informed?

I don't know.

Maybe the goal isn't to have no expectations.

Maybe it's to be honest about what they were.

Write them down.

Before you know what happened.

Then look at the evidence.

What did we think would happen?

What actually happened?

What did we learn from the difference?

Yesterday's future.

Tomorrow's past.

Same test. Different perspective.

Maybe that's the point

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to figure out what comes next.

That's reasonable.

Decisions have consequences.

Planning matters.

Ambition matters.

Goals matter.

Expectations matter.

But perhaps every once in a while, it's worth asking whether something we're living today was once one of those things sitting out there in the future.

Something we wanted.

Something we worked toward.

Something we couldn't wait to experience.

Yesterday's future.

Because tomorrow it'll be somewhere else.

Tomorrow's past.

Same day.

Different perspective.

For lack of a conclusion…

So which is better?

Yesterday's future?

Or tomorrow's past?

Would you rather anticipate the day or remember it?

And what about the version you're actually living?

I wrote the line about 25 years ago.

I've had plenty of time to think about it.

You'd think I'd have the answer by now.

I don't know.

Maybe that's okay.

Some questions aren't valuable because they give us answers.

They're valuable because they keep us thinking.