“The future is much like the present, only longer.”
– Dan Quisenberry
“In the long run, it will all be worth it.” This is what we often tell ourselves when we encounter a difficult situation, be it a career choice, a romantic relationship, or a creative project.
But here’s a question to think about: will it really be worth it?
Having a long-term perspective on things is obviously important. It helps us transcend the immediate stresses that we experience in whatever we do. Because anything worth doing requires that we have the grit to stick to it for the long haul.
But there’s another side to this that we don’t like to hear about. Thinking long-term inevitably comes with its own biases. For one thing, we have the tendency to overestimate how different things will be in the future. In our minds, we have an idealized picture of how our problems would somehow resolve themselves.
With that being said, thinking long-term can be a crutch — an excuse for us to sweep our problems under the rug, to avoid thinking about the things that actually matter.
As Morgan Housel writes in Same as Ever, “Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might be the opposite: The longer your time horizon, the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience.”
He also brilliantly quips, “Patience is often stubbornness in disguise.”
A big part of why this bias happens is that it’s hard to admit that we’re wrong, or that something we’ve invested our heart and soul in is not right for us.
Quitting my Master’s my scary, despite how miserable being in the program made me. It took me a big deal of honesty with myself to actually listen to how I actually felt about everything, and to acknowledge that it wasn’t working for me anymore.
Besides the time and effort I had invested in, and not to mention the university and taxpayers’ money (I was under both a government grant and a university scholarship), which made it difficult for me to quit — there were egotistic reasons as well.
I think I secretly enjoyed sounding sophisticated when I told people I was doing a Master of Philosophy, which, in most people’s minds, conjured mental images of dead Greeks — when it simply meant I was in a research program.
It was easy to tell myself “It will be worth it in the long run”, until it wasn’t easy anymore.
But that’s the thing. You don’t have to wait until you’re in an unbearable amount of pain for you to take your mind off the long-term, and to take in a more holistic view of both the present and the future.
It’s always worth considering in different aspects of your life — are you thinking long-term, just so that you can run away from your problems? Because you probably are.
Izzat Zailan 