Key takeaways:
- Research suggests that seeing a realistic photo of your future self may influence your decisions
- Using ChatGPT to age a selfie could change your investing habits
- Reducing bad habits and introducing good ones can keep your future self happy
Take a selfie, share it with ChatGPT, and ask it to show you what you’ll look like in 20 years. You might start thinking differently about the decisions you make today.
That’s because, according to research by behavioural scientist Hal E. Hershfield, people act in future-oriented ways when they’re exposed to realistic images of their future selves.
Try it out.
It’s hard to make an unhealthy lunch choice when future you is staring back at you , silently encouraging the salad.
How to add your future self to the conversation
It might not sound intuitive - but your future self is already in the conversation. Each choice you make now has a long-term impact that’ll reverberate down the track.
And it’s the smaller choices you make, like how you spend your time, how you spend your money, and who you hang out with, that can have the biggest payoffs.
Does future me want present me to freak out about this?
I can keep future me happy by adopting good investing habits. I can make it easier to adopt good investing habits by avoiding bad ones.
There are at least two cues for bad habits according to James Clear, who wrote the book on how to form good ones.
Emotional states, and other people.
If you’re a long-term investor, you’ll know the feeling of emotional investing well. You get it when you open your app and your portfolio has dropped, even if you’re up overall.
If you’re a short-term trader, you might’ve fallen for FOMO and picked up a stock you regret, or missed out on one that went on to grow.
Emotional states can cause us to act against our best long-term interests. We might panic-sell or buy up a new stock because of FOMO and get stuck with a dud. Invest in something we don’t understand because we’re scared to miss out, or miss out completely because we’re too scared to jump in.
We might listen to other people and forget they’ve got different motivations, incentives, and timeframes. What they’re telling us also might not be the full story.
What does your future self want you to do?
There are some things we can guess at. Your future self most likely wants to feel good about where they are in life.
And that’s why we think it’s worth adopting good investing habits.
- Do your research so you know what you’re invested in and can separate the signal from the noise.
- Understand your options, because investments have different levels of risk, return, and costs, and you should know about them.
- Have an investment plan, so you’re less likely to freak out during volatility.
- Consider automating your investments or using round-ups, to create a system that works for you.
In short
The choices you make today will impact your future self, and the more you can identify with your future self, the better off you may end up.
Ready to make a move for your future self?
Discover Spaceship Voyager, our range of managed fund investment portfolios, including the risks, costs, PDS and TMD, and see how you can make choices now that could give your future self more choice. Keep in mind, investing comes with risk, and returns aren’t guaranteed.
