Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.

Impulsivity and selfishness are just two halves of the same coin, as are their opposites restraint and empathy. Perhaps this is why people who show dark traits like psychopathy and sadism score low on empathy but high on impulsivity. Perhaps it’s why impulsivity correlates with slips among recovering addicts, while empathy correlates with longer bouts of abstinence. These qualities represent our successes and failures at escaping our own egocentric bubbles, and understanding the lives of others—even when those others wear our own older faces.

Ed Yong writing in The Atlantic

Sailing into Adventure

Three Englishmen decided to sail across the English Channel on a whim and a 7-foot dinghy in May of 2011. Eleven hours later they greeted rescuers with cries of “Bonjour,” thinking they had reached the coast of France. But the trio had traveled just two miles from where they had launched their tiny boat. One of the rescuers told the media that the smallest of waves might have capsized them.

It’s easy to laugh at the young men. They only brought a single paddle with a bottle of wine on their big adventure. Yet how often we are likewise adrift, thinking only of the fun we'll have during our journey, unaware we are going nowhere?

Stephen Goforth