Life is generally much more stable for humans than for the average pigeon, and human frontal lobes much larger, but still we humans can’t get over the ancestral tendency to live in the moment. When we are hungry, we gobble French fries as if driven to lard up on carbs and fat now, since we might not find any next week. Obesity is chronic not just because we routinely underexercise, but also because our brain hasn’t caught up with the relative cushiness of modern life.[25] We continue to discount the future enormously, even as we live in a world of all-night grocery stores and 24/7 pizza delivery.
Future discounting extends well beyond food. It affects how people spend money, why they fail to save enough for retirement, and why they so frequently rack up enormous credit card debt. One dollar now, for example, simply seems more valuable than $1.20 a year hence, and nobody seems to think much about how quickly compound interest rises, precisely because the subjective future is just so far away — or so we are evolved to believe. To a mind not evolved to think about money, let alone the future, credit cards are almost as serious a problem as crack. (Fewer than 1 in 50 Americans uses crack regularly, but nearly half carry regular credit card debt, almost 10 percent owing over $10,000.)
Our extreme favoritism toward the present at the expense of the future would make sense if our life span were vastly shorter, or if the world were much less predictable (as was the case for our ancestors), but in countries where bank accounts are federally insured and grocery stores reliably restocked, the premium we place on the present is often seriously counterproductive.
The more we discount the future, the more we succumb to short-term temptations like drugs, alcohol, and overeating. As one researcher, Howard Rachlin, sums it up, in general, living a healthy life for a period of ten years, say, is in trinsically satisfying… Over a ten-year period, virtually all would prefer living a healthy life to being a couch potato. Yet we also (more or less) prefer to drink this drink than not to drink it, to eat this chocolate sundae than to forgo it, to smoke this cigarette than not smoke it, to watch this TV program than spend a half-hour exercising… [emphasis added]
I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that this tension between the short term and the long term defines much of contemporary Western life: the choice between going to the gym now and staying home to watch a movie, the joy of the French fries now versus the pain of winding up later with a belly the size of Buddha’s.
But the notion that we are shortsighted in our choices actually explains only half of this modern bourgeois conflict. The other half of the story is that we humans are the only species smart enough to appreciate the fact that there is another option. When the pigeon goes for the one ounce now, I’m not sure it feels any remorse at what has been lost. I, on the other hand, have shown myself perfectly capable of downing an entire bag of the ironically named Smartfood popcorn, even as I recognize that in a few hours I will regret it.
And that too is a sure sign of a kluge: when I can do something stupid even as I know at the time that it’s stupid, it seems clear that my brain is a patchwork of multiple systems working in conflict. Evolution built the ancestral reflexive system first and evolved systems for rational deliberation second — fine in itself. But any good engineer would have put some thought into integrating the two, perhaps largely or entirely turning over choices to the more judicious human forebrain (except possibly during time-limited emergencies, where we have to act without the benefit of reflection). Instead, our ancestral system seems to be the default option, our first recourse just about all the time, whether we need it or not. We eschew our deliberative system not just during a time crunch, but also when we are tired, distracted, or just plain lazy; using the deliberative system seems to require an act of will. Why? Perhaps it’s simply because the older system came first, and — in systems built through the progressive overlay of technology — what comes first tends to remain intact. And no matter how shortsighted it is, our deliberative system (if it manages to get involved at all) inevitably winds up contaminated. Small wonder that future discounting is such a hard habit to shake.
Choice slips a final cog when it comes to the tension between logic and emotion. The temptation of the immediate present is but one example; many alcoholics know that continued drink will bring them to ruin, but the anticipated pleasure in a drink at a given moment is often enough to overwhelm sensible choice. Emotion one, logic zero.
Perhaps it is only a myth that Menelaus declared war on the Trojans after Paris abducted the woman Menelaus loved, but there can be little doubt that some of the most significant decisions in history have been made for reasons more emotional than rational. This may well, for example, have been the case in the 2003 invasion of Iraq; only a few months earlier, President Bush was quoted as saying, in reference to Saddam Hussein, “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.” Emotion almost certainly plays a role when certain individuals decide to murder their spouse, especially one caught in flagrante delicto. Positive emotions, of course, influence many decisions too — the houses people buy, the partners they marry, the sometimes dubious individuals with whom they have short-term flings. As my father likes to say, “All sales” — and indeed all choices — “are emotional.” From the perspective developed in this book, what is klugey is not so much the fact that people sometimes rely on emotions but rather the way those emotions interact with the deliberative system. This is true not just in the obvious scenarios I mentioned — those involving jealousy, love, vengeance, and so forth — but even in cases that don’t appear to engage our emotions at all. Consider, for example, a study that asked people how much they would contribute toward various environmental programs, such as saving dolphins or providing free medical checkups to farm workers in order to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. When asked which effort they thought was more important, most people point to the farm workers (perhaps because they valued human lives more than those of dolphins). But when researchers asked people how much money they would donate to each cause, dolphins and farm workers, they gave more to the cuddly dolphins. Either choice on its own might make sense, but making the two together is as inconsistent as you can get. Why would someone spend more money on dolphins if that person thinks that human lives are more important? It’s one thing for our deliberative system to be out of sync with the ancestral system, another for the two to flip-flop arbitrarily in their bid for control.
In another recent study, people were shown a face — happy, sad, or neutral — for about a sixtieth of a second — and then were asked to drink a “novel lemon-lime beverage.” People drank more lemon-lime after seeing happy faces than after viewing sad ones, and they were willing to pay twice as much for the privilege. All this presumably shows that the process of priming affects our choices just as much as our beliefs: a happy face primes us to approach the drink as if it were pleasant, and a sad face primes us to avoid the drink (as if it were unpleasant). Is it any wonder that advertisers almost always present us with what the rock band REM once called “shiny, happy people”?
25
Ironically, our ability to moderate temptation increases with age, even as our life expectancy goes down. Children, who are the most likely to live into the future, are the least likely to be patient enough to wait for it.