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Service to Our Future Self

When we were fifteen years old (sophomore in high school) how much did we really know about who we would become at age forty. Did we have the capacity to accurately forecast twenty-five years ahead? Did we really know what our forty year old self would be like in this world? How many young kids know what is important to an adult in mid-life? I dare say that the person at age forty struggles with the same dilemma in terms of predicting their exact needs and desires twenty five years later at age sixty-five. And probably so for age ninety!

We seem to all think that our older self is just an older version of our current self. Shocker when that proves untrue. We may not know the exact details and boundaries of our future lives but we can make ongoing decisions that will make our future self have significantly more options and thus better quality of life. There are three areas where we currently can make choices that are in service to the older version of ourselves.

Physical

The Longevity Tool is based on a detailed statistical analysis led by Professor Dean Foster while at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The Tool is based on the National Institutes Of Health and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) dataset of approximately 555,000 AARP members in six states. Take the survey below and fill in different amounts of exercise etc to see how it impacts your longevity. Bottom line: get moving all through life and you have more life later. Notice how a small tweak to the pattern of your life adds MORE life! Check this out: Life Expectancy

Do the same for the health risk calculator below. Play with this. Notice how different amounts entered produce different outcomes in your health risk. Check this out: Personal Health Risk Calculator

Relationships

We need deep meaningful relationships over the course of our whole life or bad things happen. Basically it's an ongoing battle against loneliness. Loneliness is defined as, “distressing feeling that accompanies the perception that one's social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one's social relationships”. If you want to nerd out just a bit read the following scientific review of the negative impacts of loneliness. Engage the war on loneliness or invite increased risk of poor cardiovascular health, increased cognitive decline over time, increased depression, decreased self-regulation, reduced adequate sleep, worse immune functioning, and mortality. The research on the impact of loneliness is profound. There is a kind of compound interest that accrues over time. Check this out: Why Loneliness Matters?

Financial

Take a small amount of money and invest it each month for thirty years and have a philosophy of not touching it under any circumstances. And watch the power of compound interest! Money cannot buy happiness but it can have an impact on whether you are financially forced into being a greeter at Walmart while in your seventies. It can give you the opportunity to do various things with your children or grandchildren later in life. It can give you the freedom to live according to your choices versus live under the crushing weight of external pressures.

I wish everyone could read this extremely helpful, readable, and common sense book. It can change your life. It's a book about how to live. We would have a different world if everyone read this book. Check this out: The Psychology of Money

Joe DeBruin