Part 1: The Outfit We Thought We’d Wear
A few weeks ago, I picked out an outfit I thought I wanted to wear the next day.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about the outfit. But as I laid it out, I was already imagining the next morning: how I would look in the mirror, how I would feel wearing it, how I might carry myself differently because I felt put together.
And somewhere in that small act of choosing clothes, I began imagining the day ahead.
It would be a good day. I would feel good. I might even be a little more energized, productive, or optimistic because I had started the day feeling like I had my act together.
Without realizing it, I was doing something we all do constantly: trying to predict how we will feel in the future.
Psychologists call this affective forecasting, or our attempts to predict our future emotional states. And it turns out, we’re not nearly as good at it as we tend to think.
The next morning, I woke up after a lousy night of sleep. Before I had even had my coffee, an unexpected email landed in my inbox. It wasn’t catastrophic. It wasn’t even particularly unusual. But in that moment, it was enough to shift my mood.
Suddenly, the outfit didn’t matter.
I didn’t want to dress up. I didn’t want to be particularly productive. I didn’t want to tackle any of the grand ideas I had imagined the night before.
I just wanted to Get. Through. The. Day.
What struck me later was not that my mood had changed. Of course it had. That’s part of being human.
What struck me was how confident I was the previous evening in predicting how I would feel the next morning. I had imagined a future version of myself who would wake up, put on that outfit, look in the mirror, and feel hopeful about the day.
But I had left out a rather important variable: I didn’t know what I would wake up carrying.
I couldn’t know how well I would sleep. I couldn’t know what email would arrive. I couldn’t know what conversation might happen, what might frustrate me, what might delight me, or what unexpected thing might change the emotional landscape of the day.
And neither can any of us.
Yet we make decisions every day based on predictions about how we will feel.
I’ll be happier when I get that promotion. I’ll finally relax when this project is finished. I’ll feel more confident when I lose the weight. I’ll be miserable if I don’t get this opportunity. I’ll have more energy once things settle down.
Sometimes those predictions are right. But often, they’re not. We tend to imagine the future as if the emotional experience we’re having while imagining it will simply be transported intact into the future.
It won’t.
Future us will arrive with different circumstances, a different mood, different information, different needs—and a brain that may respond very differently than the one doing the imagining today.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look forward to things. And it certainly doesn’t mean my carefully chosen outfit was a bad idea.
Maybe the more useful lesson is simply this: The future is not something we experience in advance. It is something we meet.
And perhaps the goal isn’t to become better at predicting exactly how we’ll feel.
Perhaps it’s to become better at noticing what we’re feeling when we get there, and deciding what we want to do next.