The Days BEHIND Us Determine The Days AHEAD Of Us

The Days BEHIND Us Determine The Days AHEAD Of Us

I was watching the Netflix thriller SNIPER ULTIMATE KILL and while mourning a fellow sniper who committed suicide even if he was at the TOP OF HIS GAME, a fellow sniper murmured that The Days BEHIND Us Determine The Days AHEAD Of Us.  Well said and I immediately thought that's my thread for today because it is damn reflective of our life, the days behind us seem a distant past WHILE many of us are preoccupied with the days ahead📗📙📘

IF Philosophy is good at one unique thing, it is pointing things out that seem so obvious BUT we humans DON'T even notice them and making them suddenly seem unnervingly strange.  So, the $64 question is: WOULD YOU RATHER THAT YOUR BEST DAYS WERE AHEAD OF YOUR, OR BEHIND YOU?  There's just NO right OR wrong answer here because at the end of the day, this is your personal decision BUT to state the obvious, of course we'd all prefer our best days to be ahead of us.  Heard of the typical career of sales folks?  Probably you heard of the top notch sales executive WHO always rakes in top honors during the sales recognition.  BUT here's the BUT💥💥💥

This is NOT news at all.  Each time the top sales executive achieves the mark, in the next round, his bosses will move the goal post and he has to achieve that new target.  And that vicious cycle will never end, trust me.  The thing is, nobody wants to think that they have already peaked.  And that might even seem perfectly rational.  After all, if your future is going to be better than your past, your life overall will ultimately contain more goods than it would IF things just coast along as they are, or worse, if things started to decline OR even just dip.  BUT this is WHERE those weirdly artificial thought experiments really come into their own💚💛💜

Having said this, psychologists have recently uncorked something yet unbeknownst to us all.  That generally, we humans are biased towards the future, a bias that seems so deep we DON'T even notice it, a bias that can at least in theory lead us to act against our overall best interests.  As an analogy, let's take a bee sting that hurts the same as Tuesday as it does on Thursday regardless WHETHER today is a Wednesday OR Friday.  So, WHY would we rather be stung yesterday than tomorrow???

Our takeaway:  Logic-wise, this bias seems to work differently depending on WHETHER we're thinking about our own future OR those of others.  Respected philosopher Caspar Hare was even quoted that our bias seems different depending on WHETHER we're near OR far from the person WHOSE welfare we're considering.  In a quite philosophical train of thought, we often say that someone is 'gone too soon' BUT we never lament that someone was 'born too late', right?  UNLESS we mean that they would have thrived better in an earlier epoch than they do now.  YES, just as non-existence is non-existence, just as pain is pain.  YES dude, THE DAYS BEHIND US DETERMINE THE DAYS AHEAD OF US😊😊😊