Ricky and Morty explain Time Preference
Sympathize with your future self to avoid the moral hazard of procrastination.
Procrastination is an insidious vice that requires a synthesis of Adam Smith’s awful virtues—self-command, discipline, and determination—with his amiable ones—humanity, benevolence, and sympathy.
Unlike the Smith family from Rick and Morty, we are not in possession of Rick Sanchez’s “Somnambulator”: a sci-fi contraption that programs the actions of our sleeping selves. We cannot simply shunt undesirable, challenging, or otherwise demanding tasks to our unconscious alter egos.
When we go to sleep, we do not delegate chores to drones but to our future self who damns us for doing so. We know that we are simply kicking the ball down the road to our future self—that’s us—who will be under even more stress and anxiety to complete the task.
Yet, despite knowing the detrimental impact of our actions, we dissociate with our future self and the moral hazard of procrastination remains: I won’t bear the cost of this; future me will. Good luck, sucker!
To overcome the insidious allure of procrastination, it is insufficient to grit one’s teeth and just do it (is that trademarked?). That is, for most of us, most of the time, the awful virtues are just not going to cut it. These virtues have atrophied for want of use in modern society—for which we owe a debt of gratitude to our predecessors. So what’s the solution?
Season 6, Episode 4 of Rick and Morty is instructive. To distill the moral of the episode, if we do not sympathize with our future selves who experience the pain of our present pleasure, we will not act wisely or justly toward ourselves and be made worse off. It is through sympathizing with ourselves—conveniently, the person with whom we’re most ready to do so—that we can alter our pernicious high time preference with a more even, productive, and happy distribution of labor.