On Borrowed Foresight

Happy Friday, and congratulations on conquering another week. RIGHT HERE is your reminder that as machines get better at nearly everything, the one thing that stays irreplaceable is human excellence itself. That is human prowess. We are striving for it, and you're reading this because you're striving for it too. Let's get into it.

There's a pattern that you know quite well. You gain weight, so then you start to run, start to work out. You fail the class, so then you start to study and lock in. You tear something, and then you finally learn the name of the muscle that tore. We rarely move against a problem until that problem has a body, until it's formalized, and when that body is ours, the lesson arrives no matter what. It sits there and waits until it has cost us something, enough that it begins to speak, and there you can identify the problem.

We're not intrinsically lazy, but we are built neurologically to overweight the present. Behavioral economics would call this present bias, where a reward available now is worth and feels far more than the same reward later, and the cost deferred gets discounted almost to nothing. See, in 2004 there was a brain imaging study conducted where choosing an immediately available reward actually lit up the brain's reward circuitry, and the harder that emotional system dominated the cooler planning regions, the more likely someone was to grab the sooner, smaller, more immediate option. So the future self, the one that does run and study and stretch, is neurologically pretty much a stranger, and we keep volunteering that stranger for the hard part.

All this weight and failure and injury are not flaws of one's character, but the logical and predictable output of a discounting machine doing exactly what it was built to do. Now, the problem is that tragedy isn't real until it's our own, until we own it. Our health stays abstract and irrelevant until it starts to take things from us and diminish our quality of life. The wound, the issue, is just the moment the future becomes present enough to feel and recognize.

In my research at Johns Hopkins, and in my conversation with one of my professors this week, he stated that there are things in life that accelerate momentum, and the power of momentum is enormous. But we get blindsided by a problem and then go hunting for the solution, and we lose all of it in the search. You get hurt, and then you go to physical therapy. Why not do the physical therapy while you're still healthy?

See, what my professor offered wasn't just advice. It was foresight that he had already paid for, a lesson that his own life experience had lived, so that I wouldn't have to bleed for the same one. It was given to me, and that is the whole game. An algorithm or a large language model can forecast my doom and collapse with scary accuracy. They can model the odds, draft the plan, set the reminders, and build an app that holds everything together. But what it cannot do is have lived it, and it cannot care enough to walk over and hand me the lesson before I've earned the scar. That transfer, from one person paying in experience so that another person can skip the tuition and the cost, is something no machine will ever perform, because it requires having a past and giving a damn about another human.

Foresight, as we've talked about, has a name and a clock. There's a body of research that my professor was describing, and psychologists call it proactive coping. The case for acting early isn't only that it's wiser. It's mechanical. A new habit needs a long and quiet runway, and the best real world study that we have to date found the median was 66 days to reach automaticity, with complex behaviors like exercise taking roughly half again as long. That runway, the time it takes to build a habit, is easy to find when life is calm. But the middle of a crisis, in the chaos, is the worst time to build a habit that would have prevented it. I understand you have to start somewhere, but being preventative, beforehand, before the crisis and the issue ensue, is optimal. Momentum compounds. This is true in all categories of life, but you can only start the compounding flywheel before you need it spinning.

While I tend to take quite a scientific approach, Stoicism, and a recent book I recommend called The Daily Stoic, play a valuable role here, because the Stoics understood this 2,000 years ago and made a practice of it. They rehearsed adversity in advance, picturing the loss and identifying the problem before it landed, so the blow falls softer. Seneca put it plainly: "He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand." This is borrowed foresight, an ancient edition.

So with that being said, where does this sit? I am young, which means I haven't been sidelined by much yet in the grand scheme of things, and that means almost all the foresight I have is borrowed. I'm sure getting kicked out of high school gave me some perspective, but mostly I want to make the point that I haven't lived enough to have earned my own foresight. When I started writing this, I felt that was something to hide, but I suspect it's actually the point.

So the question isn't whether one can summon the discipline to just be proactive on command. Frankly, I'm not sure if I can, and I don't even know if I'd listen to me if I tried. I think the real question lies underneath this, and it's this: whose hard won foresight or life experience am I too proud or too comfortable to borrow, to acknowledge, and to absorb? And what will that pride cost me before I finally pick it up and absorb it?

Per usual, I don't have the answer, and frankly I'd rather live in the question than pretend I've closed it and nailed it.

I'll leave you with a question. Whose wound, whose life lessons, are you refusing to learn from right now while you wait to acquire your own? And if someone has handed you foresight that you didn't have to bleed for, forward this to them. They'll know why.

See you in two weeks, Jaron