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Tell the young they have 5 years
Laura Carstensen at Stanford developed socioemotional selectivity theory. As people get older, their mindset shifts to the sense that they don't have as much time to live, so they focus on the things that matter.
For a young person, saving for retirement or planning for age 60 is abstract, and the real question is what to do next week. When people are given different time perspectives, they make different choices.
A related framework is selective optimization with compensation. As people age they do fewer things, dropping a wide range of activities for the one hike they really enjoy, which they still want to do once a week. People may not consciously think this way, but they may stop worrying about what used to worry them all the time.
How does a shorter time horizon change goals?
In a 1999 study, Helene Fung, Laura Carstensen, and Alan Lutz asked people to imagine having limited time, for example before a long move. Young adults who imagined this chose close, familiar social partners, as older adults typically do. When older adults imagined a long future, they showed more interest in new people. The results suggest that the sense of time left, not age itself, shapes what people want.
How did Arthur Rubinstein keep performing into old age?
Psychologists Paul and Margret Baltes used the pianist Arthur Rubinstein as an example of selection, optimization, and compensation. At 80, he reportedly played fewer pieces and practiced them more. He also slowed down before fast passages so that they sounded faster by contrast. The Baltes pair developed their model at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and published it in 1990.
Why does the future self feel like a stranger?
In 2011, Hal Hershfield and colleagues used brain imaging to compare how people thought about themselves now, themselves in ten years, and other people. Thinking about the future self produced brain activity more like thinking about another person. This may help explain why long-term goals feel abstract. The study appeared in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
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