I have been thinking a lot over the past week about what economists call “commitment devices” after listening to Freakonomic’s show “Save Me From Myself.” As Dubner and Levitt explain:
“To understand how a commitment device works — if it does work — you have to picture two versions of yourself: the current you and the future you. Sometimes it’s the case that people know that their future version of themselves will want to follow a behavior that their current version of themselves is not comfortable with. So I’m on a diet and I would like to stick to that diet. But I know that when someone puts a chocolate cake in front of me I will lose my willpower and I will eat that chocolate cake. A commitment device is an attempt on the part of a person to set up constraints so that the future self isn’t able to take advantage of the situation and do what the future self wants, but instead requires the future self to behave in a way that the current self would like the future self to behave.”
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/02/02/save-me-from-myself-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
So, the first thing I ask myself, surprisingly, isn’t if I believe commitment devices to work. Instead, blind hope lets me believe that they do, and from there I can experiment to either confirm or deny that hypothesis. (Irrationally scientific? Perhaps.) I also know that I have tired this phenomenon in parts of my life already. For a little while I was worried that I wasn’t being the most cautious driver. So, I got a license plate of my last name to basically shame myself into making good choices behind the wheel. It has mostly worked.
Essentially skipping skepticism, I begin by asking myself “what behaviors do I not trust my future self to follow?” And this list is pretty long, so I decided to focus on just three areas of my life that have been on my mind a lot recently: productivity in website design, patience with starting new relationships, and less emphasis on my virtual life. Without getting into too much personal detail, I want to get more design work completed, learn to be more patient when I like someone new, and spend less time and energy on my virtual self via social media in order to use that time and energy for things I actually enjoy but don’t make time for, like painting.
Tonight, I plan to sit down and structure what these devices might be and how they might work.
