From: Pacific Standard

Give Yourself a Present for the Future

Pacific Standard

Don’t feel like you have the time to keep a diary or bury a time capsule? You might be missing out, according to psychologists at Harvard Business School: The joy of rediscovering something even a few months old is greater than you might think.

In case you weren’t aware, we’re pretty bad at predicting our future choices and emotions. Economists find over and over that we’ll choose to invest money as long as we make the choice well before we actually see the money: If you get it today, you’ll probably head for the mall. Meanwhile, we’re also fairly bad at predicting how we’ll respond emotionally to future events.

It follows, HBS graduate student Ting Zhang and her colleagues reasoned, that we might well underestimate the value of rediscovery—though that’s not where they got the idea.

Read the whole story: Pacific Standard


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