I won't lie. If I was pursuing my Psych degree at the University right now I'd be all in on Cognitive Psych. I'd even be inclined to pursue a post-grad degree and, in this alternate reality, editing might not even be a thing for me.
My area of focus would be the consequences of living in a perpetual Now... and I would write papers with titles like "The Relationship Of Limiting Temporal Perspectives To Life Outcomes". And I'd be proud of my poorly conceived titles.
The reason for my interest, by the way, has roots plunging all the way back to the days of photo albums.
Of course if I was 18 now... I might not know that once upon a time photo albums were a thing. Family photo albums were a thing. This would be a kind of book into which you'd display all the photos you took on vacation and all of the important moments of your life. Baby pictures. Graduation pictures. And so on.
Inside each album you'd find three or four photographs per page... and you'd stroll down memory lane turning from one page to the next.
My parents were all about photo albums. They had one from their wedding day. They had assorted photographs from when they were younger (which was completely impossible to believe, that they were that young). Most importantly, though, they had albums filled with me. Of my baby pictures. Of growing up. My grade school class photographs were in there. As were pictures from my various birthdays.
So.
It was natural for me, once I started taking photographs myself, to create my own photo albums. Which I did a lot. Eventually including captions and flat things I could slip in-between the album pages. A rudimentary precursor to what would become the craft of scrapbooking.
As I progressed through grade school, I also became a writer. I'd write stories, the first ones, I think, in third grade. And I kept writing stories through Jr. high. In high school, I made up funny stories about my friends and I. In college, instead of journalling, I wrote about experiences I had in story form. At the Art Institute, I was always writing down funny things I heard or funny things that happened. And later, when I was married and became a father, I started writing about our family experience.
And I'm still writing about it.
Now the point I'm trying to make is that I've been lugging around my past since I was a kid. And I've been thinking about, processing my life since I was a teenager.
All of which contributes to the way I think about the complexities of life and the way I respond to circumstances today.
Bottom line: all that processing gives me an additional opportunity to learn.
But.
What if I didn't do any of that? What if I didn't keep my photographs in an album. Or, if I did, what if I never looked at them or thought about what they represent? And what if I didn't think about my life? What if I didn't process my circumstance, think about it, play out possibilities in my mind?
What would my life be like if all I allowed myself to experience was the Present? What if all my life consisted of was a relentless sort of Now?
What if I didn't take that additional opportunity to learn? And how would that affect my future? How would affect the entirety of my life?
Hence the title, "The Relationship Of Limiting Temporal Perspectives To Life Outcomes".
Who would I be... and how would I be it?
Is the ability to develop and gain perspective on my own life not only a legitimate human superpower but also crucial to my life's outcome... or is it irrelevant.
That's what I would study.
That's what I would research and write about.
That would be the subject of my experiments.
Is the human ability to mentally rove through time crucial to how our lives play out...
Or is it not.
And then.
And then I'd do radio and TV interviews about what I learned. I'd write scholarly articles for the Times. And I'd have a YouTube channel.
Pretty much.
Because my hypothesis is that...
1) If we're deprived of the ability to position and consider our lives in context, in that space after Before and before Next...
2) If we lose an additional avenue of learning from our own experience...
3) And if we're stripped of the opportunity to iterate our own futures based on a full consideration of our lives, then...
We lose an important navigational tool that absolutely serves as an informed guide through every next day of our lives.
We lose an important teaching tool that normally serves to prevent us from repeating our mistakes.
And we become hopelessly trapped...
In an ever-repeating Now.
