Sam Johnson

We don't really take comfort in the fact that it's going to happen in the distant future to some other version of ourselves.

We mostly just anticipate that we're going to feel a lot of dread about that.

So whereas thinking about positive things in the future is kind of mixed, thinking about negative things in the future is just really bad.

Probably.

So this would be, of course, speculating wildly beyond our actual data.

But it is probably true that feeling emotions like dread can help us to avoid.

Yes, like it does help us to avoid calculated risks, like in the investment example that you gave earlier or starting a business like I was talking about.

but also probably helps you to avoid risks that really aren't a good idea for you to take on.

So it's probably this kind of catch-all mechanism that prevents us from making changes in the future.

Some of them might be good, some of them might be bad.

It's probably too big of a net.

I think so.

So one thing that pops out in our data is that people who are more mindful, which is to say focused more on the present, tend to be less prone to this type of behavior and this type of pattern.

So it's probably the case that we can cultivate mindfulness over a longer period of time.

So certainly there are things like mindfulness meditation that can help you to be more mindful in a particular moment.

And it might be possible that by training ourselves to be more mindful, we can also regulate our feelings better around dread.

It's all of the above, actually, David.

So the way that we think about dread is any kind of negative feelings that you have about things that haven't happened yet.

So we can separate out that definition though, which is kind of the way that we think about this, from what we're actually doing when we measure it.

And when we're measuring this, what we're really doing is seeing, okay, for people who are going to expect to be financially worse off in the next year,