Meet Your Future Self and Make Better Life Decisions Today

Thank you so much. It’s so nice to be here with everybody.

So, when Ryan Johansson was 11 years old, his father, Arie, was diagnosed with ALS.

Ryan and his dad had this really close relationship. It was, um, a mature one, the type of relationship that I aspire to have with my own kids, in fact. They were able to talk about all sorts of things.

Arie was able to talk to Ryan about the reality of what he was facing, and they continued to spend a lot of time together during this period.

But even though they were spending all this time together, Ryan noticed that his dad started spending hours each day writing.

The writing continued even as Arie’s health deteriorated. At first, he used the help of some devices, and then the assistance of a nurse. But the writing continued.

Now, Ryan was a bit of a caretaker. He was the oldest of four kids, and every morning he would go in and check on his dad before football practice or school.

On one of those mornings, about three years after the initial diagnosis, he found that his dad had passed away.

Ryan is now the chief of police in San Bruno, in Northern California, and he faces difficult situations regularly. That’s almost a hallmark of his job.

But he told me that this was one of the most awful moments he had ever faced.

What’s interesting, though, is that finding his father no longer alive is not the most dominant or vivid memory he has of that morning.

Instead, his memories and recollections go far beyond the negativity and trauma we normally associate with moments like that.

And it’s because of some of the actions Arie took and some of the communication he had around the end of life.

I’ll say more about this in a bit, but because of Arie’s approach to death and dying, Ryan’s experience with grief, and his acceptance of mortality even to this day, are far more positive than we might otherwise expect.

If only more people could approach the end of life with the kind of clarity Arie did.

Sadly, only about one in five Americans has a well-documented end-of-life plan.

And there’s good reason to want that number to be higher. As it turns out, the research shows that well-documented end-of-life plans are associated with better deaths, both for patients and caregivers.

So, of course, it’s not surprising that medical teams, palliative care doctors, and medical researchers have all tried to figure out ways to get more people to plan for the end.

Now, I’m a psychologist, um, but I teach at UCLA’s business school right down the street. My research focuses on decision-making.

I study the ways we can get people to do more of the things they say they want to do, and less of the things they don’t want to do.

So I like to use a lot of the messaging and reframing techniques that are popular among behavioral scientists.

I’ll give you one example. This isn’t my own research. It comes from some of my colleagues.

If you want people to get a flu shot, it turns out that the language you use matters.

If you get a text message that says, “There’s a flu shot reserved for you,” that leads to a 10 percent increase in the likelihood of getting the vaccine.

So it was through that same lens, the lens of behavioral science, that my students and I decided to tackle the very tricky problem of end-of-life planning.

We collaborated with doctors from UCLA Health, and we tried a number of different messages to encourage people to plan for the end and become interested in advance directives.

We said things like, “We implore you to have a say in your healthcare at the end.”

Or, “We want you to start a tradition of care and write a plan for the first time in your family.”

We even went negative and said, “Don’t be a burden to your family members. Make a plan.”

We tried all sorts of iterations.

And nothing we did worked.

Nothing worked any better than the very standard message that said, “You might be interested in an advance directive,” which itself didn’t work all that well.

All right, so why might messages like these fail?

Or maybe I’ll put it a different way: Why do people have such a hard time planning for the end and thinking about death and dying?

Psychologists have offered a number of answers. But one of the answers I really like goes something like this:

The reason we shy away from thinking about death has to do with the way we think about identity, or the way we think about ourselves over time.

So, think about it this way.

If we are one single, solitary self throughout our lifetime, then life ends when death arrives.

But there’s another way to think about selves and identity.

Rather than being one single, solitary self, we might instead be a collection of separate, distinct selves.

I think you know what I mean.

There’s a nighttime self and a morning self. There’s the pre-kid self, the parenting self, and the empty-nest self. There’s the middle-aged self and the self who is closer to the end of life.

My own research has actually found that, in some ways, people think of their future selves as if they are different people altogether.

We’ve found that, in the brain, the neural activity that occurs when we think about our future selves looks a lot like the brain activity that occurs when we think about other people.

What matters for decision-making isn’t necessarily the idea that our future selves and these other selves are different people.

What matters are the relationships and connections between the people we were, the people we are today, and the people we will become.

What matters are the throughlines between our past, present, and future selves.

What I’ve found in my work is that if we can strengthen the connection between these selves, between our present and future selves, through things like conversations or letter-writing exercises, we can get people to do more of the things they say they want to do.

Things like taking better care of their health or saving more money.

But it turns out, and this is not going to be a shock to you, that planning for the end of life may be very different from deciding whether to get off the couch and go to the gym, or whether to spend a little less and save a little more.

Those are the kinds of things behavioral scientists typically study.

It may be that there are no easy solutions to end-of-life decision-making because it’s not an easy problem to solve.

It’s almost as if Arie Johansson, the dad I was talking about earlier, had some awareness of this.

So, the morning he died, the morning his son Ryan found him, Ryan went to tell his mother.

A few minutes later, she came back with an envelope for Ryan.

Inside was a letter from Arie.

It was only about a paragraph. It was short. But it represented an effort to be there during what would obviously be a very difficult time.

What Ryan didn’t know was that there would be many more letters to come.

It turns out Arie wasn’t necessarily afraid of dying. But he was afraid of not being there in the future when his family would need him most.

So he wrote dozens of letters to mark big, significant occasions, so that he could be present when he was absent.

There was a letter for Ryan on the morning of the funeral.

There was a letter for the day of his high school graduation, and another for his college graduation.

There was one for the birth of his first child.

There’s even a letter waiting for him for when he has his first grandchild.

Ryan has now started a company called EverPresent.

He has used interrogation techniques he learned over years on the police force to help people create deeper, richer messages that they can leave posthumously for their loved ones in the form of videos.

Now, when Arie was writing these letters, I think part of what he was doing was making it easier for himself to grapple with his own mortality.

I think he was also making it easier for his children and his family to grapple with his mortality.

But I want to argue that he was doing something else too.

Just as we know we can foster stronger connections between our present and future selves within one lifetime, I think what Arie was doing was fostering a stronger connection between the person he was while he was alive and the person he would be remembered as after he died.

So, there’s this philosopher named Derek Parfit.

I know, I’m a behavioral scientist, and it feels a little wonky to quote a philosopher, but let me go there for a second.

Derek Parfit speaks to some of these issues, and he has this quote where he says:

“Death creates a strong divide between present and future experiences, but it can’t break other relations.”

What he means by this, or at least what I think he means, is that certain aspects of ourselves cease to exist when death arrives.

Our bodies. Our own memories. Our preferences.

But there are other aspects of ourselves that persist, and they do so through our closest relationships.

Whether it’s the lessons we’ve imparted to others, the memories we’ve given them, or the stories they tell about us, I think it’s clear that we can live on long after we’re gone.

So I can’t help but wonder whether there are lessons to be learned from this.

To get patients to engage more with the end of life, doctors at Stanford Health Care have introduced a new form of advance directive that takes the form of a letter.

It’s not exactly the same as what Arie and Ryan did, but it represents a similar strategy.

Essentially, people write down what matters most to them and how they want to be remembered.

I think there’s a bigger question to ask here, though, and this is the question I want to leave you with:

If we want people to engage more and think more deeply about the end of life, could we make death a little less scary, and planning a little more likely, by asking people to think about the ways they may continue to exist?

The ways their selves may last long after life itself.

Thank you so much.