People defect on their future selves by procrastinating because their future selves can’t retaliate. I’ve thought of a single exception to this: if you journal or write fiction regularly and are in the habit of surfacing your writing for review, you can punish the self from a given day or week by telling the surfacing algorithm to drop the notes from that period. The project ideas you have won’t be picked up, your preoccupations and feelings will be forgotten.
It’s a one-person version of damnatio memoriae – the practice of officially erasing a person, typically a deceased emperor or public figure, from all public memory, by destroying images, removing names from inscriptions and official records, and even rewriting history to exclude their existence.
Does this work? No, absolutely not. I still procrastinate. But because I am my primary interlocutor and witness, it is a real punishment to have future review withdrawn. I think it would 20% work if
- my reviews of my writings and photographs were driven by an algorithm I controlled, not by haphazard random jumping
- I wrote and read more often than I do (the more I live in the world of my notes, the more its rewards matter to me)
- I talked to other people less than I do (and my own self was a larger trading partner in my attention network)
You need to be unusual to make this work even a little bit, so the point of this post is mostly to say: look at this one neat exception.