The Time Paradox

This ideal time profile is a balance of being high on the past-positive, moderately high on the present-hedonistic and future, and low on the past-negative and present-fatalistic time perspectives. Such a balance generates the combined strengths of these time frames without any of the negatives of their excesses.

The crypt is a solemn reminder to the living of our ultimate destiny. While Rome’s other attractions display the life’s work of some of the world’s greatest artists, this crypt stores remnants of the lives themselves. If the bones could talk, they would tell stories of thousands of aspiring Leonardos, Michelangelos, and Raphaels lying there. Yet the crypt’s silent message is not an admonition that we prepare for death but an impassioned plea that we live meaningfully and fully the lives we are living right now.

This is the first paradox of time: Your attitudes toward time have a profound impact on your life and your world, yet you seldom recognize it.

If our project succeeds, you will learn how to transform negative experiences into positive ones and how to capitalize on the positives in the present and the future without succumbing to blind devotion to either. Therein lies a second key paradox of time: Moderate attitudes toward the past, the present, and the future are indicative of health, while extreme attitudes are indicative of biases that lead predictably to unhealthy patterns of living. Our goal is to help you reclaim yesterday, enjoy today, and master tomorrow.

What is the right use of your time? Ultimately, you must be the arbiter of your personal investment choices, but our research suggests that people are more satisfied with investment in experiences, such as vacations, and in developing meaningful social relationships than with investment in material goods.

Consistent with the findings from the Good Samaritan research, Levine found that in general, the cities with the fastest pace of life were the least helpful.

Death is the end of a lifetime. Denial of death is a denial that time will end. If you deny that time will end, you are likely to treat time much differently than you would if you felt time to be scarce and of limited duration. If you imagine your life as infinite, you are unlikely to value time as more precious than gold and more likely to treat it as ordinary grains of sand on a beach. Ironically, denying death relieves anxiety and psychological stress, but it may also lead you to devalue life, so you may live less fully.

In 1971 I conducted a now-infamous experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, on the Stanford University campus in order to investigate the power that social situations have to influence the behavior of ordinary people—in particular, how good people can be led to treat others badly.

These mock prisoners had quickly imprisoned themselves in despair by focusing on very recent negative experiences of only days in a mock prison.

That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.

Psychological determinism asserts that every thought and feeling we have and every action we perform is caused by events in the past. Although determinism may seem incompatible with the feeling that you exercised free will in choosing what you ate for breakfast this morning, science is based upon it.

The major traumas of childhood may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one. Bad childhood events, in short, do not mandate adult troubles. There is no justification in these studies for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, aggression against your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child.28

We authors believe that the past matters, but it matters less than Freud and the behaviorists claimed. Everyone is affected by the factual past but not completely determined by it. And it is not the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. Your attitudes toward events in the past matter more than the events themselves. This distinction between the past and your current interpretation of it is critical, because it offers hope for change.

You cannot change what happened in the past, but you can change your attitudes toward what happened. Sometimes changing the frame can alter the way you see the picture.

Psychologists have demonstrated that no one can be certain about what happened in the past, but our research has shown that what people believe about the past influences how they think, feel, and behave in the present. People who have positive attitudes about the past—whether or not these attitudes are based upon accurate memories—tend to be happier, healthier, and more successful than people who have negative attitudes toward the past.

At the end of the nine weeks, students in the gratitude group rated their lives more favorably and reported fewer physical illnesses than students in the hassles or objective events group, and they reported spending more time exercising than the students in the hassles group. They also had more positive emotion overall.

If holocaust survivors are able to retain a positive outlook on life and to see the good in the past, so can you. If people who suffer from neuromuscular diseases are able to find things for which they are grateful—and by so doing increase their happiness—so can you.

According to the Dalai Lama, happiness is not a static state that we attain. It is an elusive goal that we must constantly pursue.34 So it is with the past. Even a happy past is under constant reconstruction.

A baby is a little present-oriented hedonist who wants nothing more than to get pleasure and avoid pain.

Present-oriented people do not use basic if-then reasoning—i.e., what causes or leads to what—and therefore can be at a disadvantage in bargaining and negotiating, in conflict resolution, and in academic and professional settings. In short, they may be at a disadvantage in the complex postmodern world.

Holism is the absolute present==, a concept central to Buddhism and meditation, and is very different from the Western linear view of time. The absolute present contains both past and future.

By opening your mind fully to the present moment, you give up longing and desire for future possibilities and surrender past regrets and obligations. This form of present attention or mindfulness can fill your entire being, replacing your sense of past and future with a sense of everything being one and the same.

Timothy Leary, Harvard psychology professor turned LSD guru, advocated three paths for young people to follow: “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Turn on to mind-altering drugs that would change their perceptions and consciousness; tune in to the playful child within them, to the inner self that rejects meaningless, boring work regimens as the way of the world; and drop out of the conforming, middle-class, future-oriented consumer society controlled by the military-industrial establishment. This manifesto intended to transform society into both a present-hedonistic state and an expansive holistic-present state.

This simple exercise obviously cannot replace the regular practice of meditation, yoga, or self-hypnosis, but you can repeat it anywhere and anytime that you like. You don’t even need a piece of paper. Simply asking yourself Who Am I?, When Am I?, Where Am I?, and How Do I Feel? is enough.

Professional athletes improve their performance by visualizing themselves successfully completing an action before it occurs. Basketball players visualize themselves making free throws with perfect form before each attempt, and baseball batters visualize themselves taking the perfect swing before every pitch. It turns out that when we practice succeeding at a task mentally, our performance actually does improve.

God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline. . . . Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. . . . If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. —Blaise Pascal4

In people, while every cell of the human body contains a simple clock,5 the master internal clock is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN),6 a small cluster of about ten thousand brain cells located at the base of the brain, in the hypothalamus near where two main nerves from the eyes intersect.

8 Our internal clock runs a little slow, so each circadian day lasts a little longer than twenty-four hours. How, then, do people avoid becoming a bit more out of sync each day? Well, although our internal clock is less accurate than a spring-wound wristwatch, it is reset more frequently. Natural environmental cues—or zeitgebers (literally, “time givers” in German)—reset our internal clock each day so that our bodily processes continue to be in harmony with the world around us.