Me Okay

“Me okay.”

As a three-year-old, my daughter, Nicola, declared this on various occasions – say, after dropping or spilling something or bonking her head or losing her way for a moment. Amidst such bruising or fumbling, she seemed to think the rest of the family needed such reassurance. And, well, given the challenges and vagaries of both childhood and parenting, maybe we did.

I recall one particular night at the dinner table when she’d said, “Me okay,” just after knocking over her little purple plastic cup. Milk trickled between table leaves and onto black and white linoleum squares and diamonds below. I’d grabbed a towel and begun wiping up the mess on the tabletop. She was helping when she said it again: “Me okay.”

What set this night apart, though, is what came next. Nicola hopped down from her chair and walked toward the sink and a towel rack attached to the countertop, where she grabbed another towel. Then she walked back to the table, towel in hand, her eyes and the crown of her head bobbing just above the tabletop.

The next moment, that little head was out of sight. And then came a thud.

After several long beats of silence, I heard, from somewhere nearly beneath the table: “Me okay.”

I stifled my laughter.

As a father watching his three-year-old explore her world, spilling milk and slipping on floors – and then eventually making her way through middle school drama and high school angst – I’ve known (in most moments) that she would, in fact, outgrow these early fumblings and be okay. I’ve trusted that, for all the challenges of childhood – the tears, the teaching moments, the tantrums, the family ups and downs, and all my own parental failings – she would eventually grow into the fairly well-adjusted and capable young adult she is today. Nicola is now a college student, and, to the best of my knowledge, she rarely spills milk anymore. She also doesn’t slip on wet linoleum much, far as I can tell. Or sit on her brother or stick Crayons in her mouth or twirl her hair with a finger while sipping said milk, like she used to when she was younger.

As she makes her way in the world and encounters successes and defeats, graces and griefs, I feel this reassurance, even when it hurts to watch my kid go through the tough stuff: She is okay. And she will be okay.

Hidden Brain podcast host Shankar Vedantam believes this attitude is shared among most parents – this perspective that we can see just enough into our kids’ futures to trust that todays’ seeming blunders, awkwardness, and wayward ways, and even mistakes and crises, will, ultimately, give way to growth and maturity. In our best moments, parents maintain this knowing sense of reassurance that our kids are going to be fine. In fact, we know that over time, from one life season to the next – whether they’re 7 or 27 or 47 – our kids will grow into very different iterations of themselves. We know this because of our own experiences of maturing well beyond our youthful versions of ourselves (well, some of us more than others…). Sometimes this happens in significant ways as we change careers, homes, beliefs, or life circumstances – even, one might argue, going go far as to reinvent ourselves after life-altering experiences or trauma.

“When we look backwards [in time], the contrast between our prior selves to who we are today is so clear,” Vedantam says.

He then suggests that we would do well to apply this parental perspective to our own lives: When we hit our toughest moments or when we fail, we can choose an attitude of sympathy, grace, and knowing assurance that we, too, will overcome or outgrow whatever we’re experiencing in the present moment. Unfortunately, we don’t usually do this.

Instead, he says (and science reveals) that we’re not actually very good at understanding – much less feeling an emotional connection to or showing such sympathy for – our future selves. We don’t live as if we’ll grow well beyond our current state. As a matter of fact, in contrast to how we view our budding children, we tend to see ourselves as static – as likely to be just about the same person in 10, 20, or 30 years from now as we are today. Vedantam calls this as an “illusion of continuity.”

“The paradox,” he says, “is that when we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become, but when we look forward, we tend to imagine that we’re going to be the same people in the future.”

He argues that people are generally able to wrap their heads around the fact that the world changes rapidly and will continue to change. We see advances in technology, for example, or the growing effects of climate change, not to mention the effects of a global pandemic that has so drastically changed so much in so little time. “But we don’t imagine,” Vedantam says, “that we ourselves will have different perspectives, different views, different preferences.”

Possibly this stems from feeling like our future selves are unknowable strangers – at least that’s what research conducted by professor Hal Hershfield at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has found. Hershfield compared brain scans of study participants as they thought about three groups of people: their current selves, their future selves, and people they didn’t know, such as celebrities. He found that peoples’ thoughts about their current and future selves lit up very different parts of the brain, but that reflections on their future selves actually overlapped with those areas of the brain that lit up when they thought about strangers.

In other words, we feel only as much empathy and warm feelings toward our future selves as we feel for people we do not know.

“That future person is abstract,” Hershfield said.

Vedantam considers the implications, at length: “What if we don’t actually know who our future selves are going to be? That’s actually both an interesting thought and a terrifying thought, because throughout our lives we’re constantly making plans for our future selves. We invest money and save for retirement because we have an image of the kind of people we’re going to be in retirement. We propose marriage and get married because we imagine that we know what we will want 25 years in the future when we are married to this person. But if in fact we are different people in the future than we are today, we are making plans for a stranger, a stranger who might look back at us with bewilderment or even resentment and ask us: ‘What made you think that that is what I would want?’”

So how do we bring to our current and future selves that same empathy and compassion we might want to show our children? How do we care for our future selves and make decisions that benefit them, when they can seem so unknowable and abstract?

Vedantam suggests that we first accept the idea that we’re going to be different in the future than we are today and then nurture those qualities in ourselves that we want to see grow. “If you allow for the fact that you’re going to become a different person, how do you help construct that person that you’re going to become?” Curiosity about what’s possible within ourselves and what might expand our horizons can help.

Secondly, he believes we’ll benefit from exercising humility and not holding too tightly to current versions of ourselves, knowing that our views and values are going to change over time. Finally, he says that it will take courage to trust that our future selves can and will evolve enough to take on life’s challenges, just as we trust that our children will do the same.

Or, as my three-old might have put it, we can trust that, “Me will be okay.”

Vedantam summarizes the point this way: “Our future selves are going to have capacities and strengths and wisdom that we do not possess today. So when we confront opportunities and we hesitate, when I tell myself, ‘I don’t think I have it in me to quit my job and start my own company,’ or I tell myself, ‘I don’t have it in me to learn a musical instrument at the age of 52,’ or, ‘I don’t have it in me to look after a disabled child,’ what we really should be saying is: ‘I don’t have the capacity to do those things today. That doesn’t mean I won’t have the capacity to do those things tomorrow.’”

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For more on the science of empathizing with our future selves, check out “Future You,” the June 16, 2023, episode of the TED Radio Hour, from which much of this blog post was sourced.