Is What I Want Now What I Want Later?
“The gold calls to us.”
—Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl1
There were many opportunities to go off track, but you’ve kept the course. You have a goal to lose weight, and you’ve been choosing each meal mindfully and effortfully—all day long. But now it’s 9 p.m. Instead of sailing smoothly, you sense your path is impeded.2 In addition to decisions about your goal, today, you have faced difficulties, frustrations, and anxieties.3 Can something mask these troubled waters with even a small dose of pleasure? It’s not the first time you’ve thought of the ice cream in the freezer. It calls to you.
You are in what I like to call an AND Moment.
AND Moments.
An AND Moment is when two “wants” are equally matched. One is the want to maintain a goal or value. The other is the want for something that opposes that goal or value. In our story, it is just before bedtime. You want to maintain your goal to lose weight—AND—you want ice cream.
During an AND Moment, you want to get your way. You want both, so you should get both. But AND Moments are binary—you’ll get one.
In moments of clarity, you understand that things, substances, and circumstances have consequences. That choosing one thing can negate another. But you don’t understand any of that during an AND Moment. During an AND Moment, you want to swing from your chandelier and live like tomorrow doesn’t exist.4
Your ability to reach and maintain your goal depends on memory and communication. These are entropic processes.5 In the natural course of a day, your thoughts of firm resolve gradually lose order.6 At 9 p.m., it’s yes or no, 1 or 0.7 You have as much freedom of choice as possible.8 So, is it yes? I’ll go to bed with a glass of cool water instead of ice cream. 1 point for goal pursuit.
If only it were that easy. AND Moments mess with your desire to sense time’s arrow.9 During an AND Moment, you want frozen time10 with an untethered future. But AND Moments are not free and independent. They have you “tied on the end of a string.”11
The Moment After. If you choose ice cream and, in the morning, let’s say, berate yourself under the umbrella question, why did I do that—again, you are in The Moment After, i.e., the moment that follows the AND Moment. The Moment After tracks the AND Moment through time the way General Hux follows the Resistance fleet through hyperspace in The Last Jedi.
But, if you choose to move toward your warm bed instead of the freezer, you could wake up the next morning and arrive in The Moment After feeling that unrivaled and supreme fresh morning sense of accomplishment. In the former, you suffer. In the latter, you flourish.
Homeostasis. One reason for choosing ice cream instead of going to sleep involves the pressures of homeostasis,12 which, at its core, insists we occupy a limited range of viable states,13 or what neuroscientist Karl Friston,14 calls “expected” states.
Expectations generally accompany a goal announcement. When you said you would lose weight, you also expected to be in a state conducive to doing it (e.g., feeling energetic and confident). That’s not how you feel at 9 p.m. You have blown past even a range of states that would be more favorable to goal attainment. This drift outside your expected state feels unwell and anguished. You are discouraged.15
After a taxing day, your desire for ice cream is an attempt to restore feelings of wellness immediately.16 Sleep would do, but that takes hours. And this: sleep is less fun in your mind’s eye than ice cream. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says our “feelings are a variety of image, made special by their unique relation to the body. Feelings are spontaneously felt images.”17
Eating ice cream is your attempt to change the felt image your brain is forming of your body.18 You want suffering to morph into pleasure.19 But AND Moments are transient (2 hours or less20 ), and the pleasure they provide remains within their bounds. Because an AND Moment’s pleasure is fleeting, eating ice cream to restore homeostasis is only a short-lived correction.21
Homeostasis is our dynamic process of life regulation.22 Our feelings are “alerting sentinels,”23 says Damasio, “mental deputies,”24 keeping a lookout to ensure we stay within our homeostatic range. They collect information about our state of life, and their qualities and intensities constitute the process of our life regulation skills.25
During an AND Moment, the nonconscious homeostatic demand is in control.26 When you are outside your range, your feelings make it clear that you must return. If you choose a rapid restoration method, such as ice cream, over quality nourishment, such as sleep, you will again be outside your range in The Moment After. Only decision-making that positively affects the present and the future will provide long-term benefits to homeostasis. This is your body, offering its wisdom toward your decision-making processes.
To oppose your immediate want during an AND Moment takes enormous effort and can only be done by a “well-trained and powerful counterforce.”27 This requires work. Neuropsychologist Mark Solms says emotional needs are no less ‘biological’ than bodily ones and that remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions also requires work. Feelings regulate our work, and we can use the feelings from The Moment After to direct our next AND Moment.28
When we choose ice cream before bed, we learn how we feel about our AND Moment choice during The Moment After. After our brief sense of becoming a smoother functioning29 organism in the evening, we wake to the reality of the felt image in the morning. If we are suffering in The Moment After, it is due to decision-making that positively affects our present during the AND Moment but negatively affects our future.
Suffering and flourishing, at the polar ends of the spectrum, are the prime motivators of…
Homeostatic Design. I’ve combined two words (Homeostatic + Design) to create a simple method of ritualized skill-building to anticipate and prevent homeostatic dysregulation.30 Homeostatic Design is a way to visually think through AND Moments before having them so that felt images within The Moment After remain within our viable and expected range of states. The Moment After is paramount because it represents a specific kind of negative feedback in the service of homeostasis, allowing us to adjust future conduct based on past performance.31 Although Homeostatic Design includes a pencil and paper, its strength resides in mental imagery, specifically the guiding force of The Moment After’s felt image.
Homeostatic Design places an AND Moment and The Moment After side-by-side and ranks them according to their felt images.32 In our story, we’ll assume the felt image your brain formed of your body (and the consequential emotion that led you to eat the ice cream) was not as strong as the felt image in the morning when you regretted your decision.
Your conscious mind during The Moment After can train your nonconscious homeostatic device.33 The felt image, the regret, the wishing you had behaved differently, is your “emotional counterpunch.”34 It feels stronger because it is stronger. Merely trying to decline ice cream the next time is hardly a solution. Instead, use Homeostatic Design to guide your movements during your next AND Moment. Memory of eating ice cream during your last AND Moment is about the past—but it is for your future.35
Regain Your Homeostasis. Choosing a want during an AND Moment that positively affects the present but negatively affects the future is a lifestyle choice. Georgetown University professor Elisabeth Stanley says, “Unlike stressful events outside our control, lifestyle choices are almost entirely up to us—especially when we’re aware of them.”36 Homeostatic Design targets lifestyle choices because of the self-harm they can inflict. Separate, Limit, and Create to regain homeostasis during and after your AND Moment.
Separate your AND Moment into three spaces on paper using the labels NOW, DURING, and AFTER.
Limit your AND Moment by any means possible to two hours or less and plot the time in your “DURING” space (e.g., 8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.). This may necessitate keeping yourself occupied before 8:00 p.m. with household chores and going to bed by 10:00 p.m.
Create a substitute and erect a playground. In your “NOW” space (your planning space), give yourself a substitute for your immediate want. Perhaps you can choose a single serving low-calorie novelty ice cream treat instead of a bowl of ice cream. Choose a place in your home where you will eat your treat that provides comfort. In your “AFTER” space, write down how proud you will feel when you wake, knowing you have resisted temptation and maintained your goal.
Use your Homeostatic Design movement map to design a flourishing life, and remember, the next time you’re faced with a difficult decision, like (1) having ice cream at 9 p.m. or (2) just going to bed, ask yourself: Is What I Want Now What I Want Later?
Verbinski, G. (2003). Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Buena Vista Pictures.
Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the Conscious Mind. New York, NY: Vintage., hereafter cited as SCTM | p 299, “The state of off-balance homeostasis is neurally represented as an impeded, troubled body landscape.”
SCTM | p 299, “In the natural course of a day, we inevitably face frustrations, anxieties, and difficulties that throw homeostasis off balance and consequently make us feel unwell, perhaps anguished, discouraged, or sad.”
Song by Sia. Songwriters: Jesse Shatkin / Sia Kate Furler. Source: Musixmatch. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sia%2C+chandelier+lyrics&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 | “I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist. Like it doesn’t exist.”
Gleick, J. (2017). Time travel: A history. New York, NY: Vintage., hereafter cited as TT | p 119, “Communication and memory are entropic processes.”
Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., hereafter cited as HS | p 154, “Most people have an intuitive understanding of what ‘entropy’ is. They think of it as a natural tendency towards disorder, dissipation, dissolution, and the like. The laws of entropy are what make ice melt, batteries lose their charge, billiard balls come to a halt and hot water merge with cold.”
Pfaff, D. W. (2006). Brain arousal and information theory: neural and genetic mechanisms. Harvard University Press. | p 15, “Information, by Shannon’s calculation, is maximized in situations of greatest uncertainty. Consider a choice between two events, one of which has the probability of p and the other (1.0-p). If either happens all the time (in this figure, the x axis = 1.0 or = 0), then its informational value is minimized. There are no surprises. On the other hand, If the situation is absolutely unpredictable (p = .5), then information is maximized.” | HS, p 157, “A bit can take one of two opposing values, e.g. yes vs no, on vs off, positive vs negative. These states are usually represented as 1 vs 0.” | Ibid., “Or to put it more simply still: the more yes/no questions one needs to answer to describe a system, the greater its entropy.” | Ibid., “Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, i.e. when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained. The information content of a fair coin toss is one bit, because the chances of the coin coming up heads are 100 percent. It provides no information because the answer is entirely predictable. Entropy measures the amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.”
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1964). The mathematical Theory of Communication. Tenth Printing. | p 9, “That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message.”| Ibid., p 13, “That information be measured by entropy is, after all, natural when we remember that information, in communication theory, is associated with the amount of freedom of choice we have in constructing messages.” | Ibid., “Having calculated the entropy (or the information, or the freedom of choice) of a certain information source, one can compare this to the maximum value this entropy could have, subject only to the condition that the source continue to employ the same symbols.” | Ibid., p 15, “In the limiting case where one probability is unity (certainty) and all the others zero (impossibility), then H is zero (no uncertainty at all- no freedom of choice - no information). Thus H is largest when the two probabilities are equal (i.e., when one is completely free and unbiased in the choice), and reduces to zero when one's freedom of choice is gone. The situation just described is in fact typical. If there are many, rather than two, choices, then H is largest when the probabilities of the various choices are as nearly equal as circumstances permit - when one has as much freedom as possible in making a choice, being as little as possible driven toward some certain choices which have more than their share of probability. Suppose, on the other hand, that one choice has a probability near one so that all the other choices have probabilities near zero. This is clearly a situation in which one is heavily influenced toward one particular choice, and hence has little freedom of choice. And H in such a case does calculate to have a very small value - the informa.tion (the freedom of choice, the uncertainty) is low.”
HS | p 155, “Entropy may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and flow.” | TT, p 116, “There’s a catchphrase, the arrow of time, familiarly used by scientists and philosophers in many languages … as shorthand for a complex fact that everyone knows: time has a direction. The phrase spread widely in the 1940s and 1950s. It came from the pen of Arthur Eddington, the British astrophysicist who first championed Einstein.” | Ibid., “Millennia had gone by without scientists needing special shorthand like “time’s arrow” to state the obvious—the great thing about time is that it goes on. Now, however, it was no longer obvious. Physicists were writing laws of nature in a way that made time directionless, a mere change of sign separating +t from -t. But one law of nature is different: the second law of thermodynamics. That’s the one about entropy.” | Ibid., p 117, “In Minkowski’s world, past and future lie revealed before us like east and west. There are no one-way signs. So Eddington added one: “I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.” He noted three points of philosophical import: 1) It is vividly recognized by consciousness., 2) It is equally insisted upon by our reasoning faculty., 3) It makes no appearance in physical science except… Except when we start to consider order and chaos, organization and randomness. The second law applies not to individual entities but to ensembles. The molecules in a box of gas comprise an ensemble. Entropy is a measure of their disorder. If you put a billion atoms of argon into the other side and allow them to bounce around for a while, they will not remain neatly separated but will eventually become a uniform—random—mixture.”
Gottlieb, A. G. (2022). The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus. New York: Schocken., hereafter cited as THOI | p xx, “In the midrashic imagination, when Moses wants to defend his people against the charge of idolatry, he claims that the Calf was made unwittingly—be-shogeg. The people are, he implies, ruled by their unconscious lives, by the compulsive repetitions that blur the impact of Revelation. They act without full intentionality, out of that moral stupidity that is related to stupor. Mei Ha-Shilo’ach develops the notion of inertia. The Golden Calf, he suggests, represents a desire for an untroubled spiritual existence, with no need for prayer. The very word egel (calf) is read as spiritual impatience. This is ‘still incomplete,’ requiring time and development to come to fullness. Calf worshippers lust for frozen time, for the stable and completed image. Aspiration, breath after breath, requires imagination, a listening-out for what is still absent.”
20th Century Fox ; Lucasfilm, Ltd.; producer, Howard Kazanjian ; story by George Lucas; screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas; director, Richard Marquand. (2013). Star wars. Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. Beverly Hills, Calif.:20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, | “They can't get away, Supreme Leader. We have them tied on the end of a string.”
SCTM | p 299, “One reason so many individuals become addicted to all manner of drugs, not to mention alcohol, has to do with the pressures of homeostasis.”
HS | p 154, “The essence of homeostasis is that living organisms must occupy a limited range of physical states: their viable states, or valued or preferred states, or what Friston calls (referring to all the above) their ‘expected’ states. We cannot afford to disperse ourselves across all possible states. It turns out that this biological imperative has a deep link with one of the most basic explanatory concepts in physics, namely entropy. | Ibid., “Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive – how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
HS | p 150, “Influence is measured by your ‘h-index’, which measures the impact of your publications. As a rule of thumb, when your h-index is greater than the number of years since you obtained your doctorate, you’re doing well. Friston’s is 235, the highest of any neuroscientist.”
SCTM | p 299, “In the natural course of a day, we inevitably face frustrations, anxieties, and difficulties that throw homeostasis off balance and consequently make us feel unwell, perhaps anguished, discouraged, or sad.”
Ibid., p 299, “One effect of the so-called substances of abuse is to restore the lost balance rapidly and transiently.”
Ibid., p 80, “Feelings are a variety of image, made special by their unique relation to the body. Feelings are spontaneously felt images. All other images are felt because they are accompanied by the particular images we call feelings.”
Ibid., p 299, “I believe they change the felt image that the brain is currently forming of its body.”
Ibid., p 299, “The suffering that corresponds to the former felt image morphs into temporary pleasure.”
Why two hours? Malcolm Gladwell teaches a Masterclass—he says he limits interviews to two hours as his focus declines after that point. If Malcolm Gladwell calls out two hours of sustained attention as max—that’s good enough for me.
SCTM | p 299, “Nonetheless, rejecting the possibility of rapid correction of suffering takes enormous effort, even for those who already know that the correction is short-lived and the consequences of the choice may be dire.”
Ibid., p 27, “Life regulation, a dynamic process known as homeostasis for short, begins in unicellular living creatures, such as a bacterial cell or a simple amoeba, which do not have a brain but are capable of adaptive behavior.”
Damasio, A. R. (2021). Feeling & Knowing. Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon., hereafter cited as F&K | p 95, “More specifically, feelings operate as alerting sentinels. They inform each mind—fortunate enough to be so equipped—of the state of life within the organism to which that mind belongs. Moreover, feelings give that mind an incentive to act according to the positive or negative signal of their messages.”
Damasio, A. R. (2018). The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon., hereafter cited as TSOT | p 25, “We can think of feelings as mental deputies of homeostasis.” | Ibid., p 26, “Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures. Is this reasonable? Is it conceivable that feelings could have motivated the intellectual inventions that gave humans (1) the arts, (2) philosophical inquiry, (3) religious beliefs, (4) moral rules, (5) justice, (6) political governance systems and economic institutions, (7) technology, and (8) science? I would respond yes, wholeheartedly.”
F&K | p 96, “Feelings collect information about the state of life within the organism, and the ‘qualities and intensities’ that are manifested by feelings constitute valuations of the process of managing life. They are direct expressions of the degree of success or failure of the life enterprise within our body.”
SCTM | p 299, “The nonconscious homeostatic demand is in natural control and can be opposed only by a well-trained and powerful counterforce.”
Ibid.
HS | p 152, “It applies even to emotional needs, which, as we saw in Chapter 5, are no less ‘biological’ than bodily ones. Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions also requires us to do work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.”
SCTM | p 299, “After certain drugs, at certain dosages, the brain represents a more smoothly functioning organism.” | F&K, p 74, “Are their operations smooth and unimpeded, or are they labored? I call these feelings homeostatic because, as direct informers, they tell us if the organism is or is not operating according to homeostatic needs, that is, in a manner conducive or not to life and survival.”
Ibid., p 54, “This is precisely what the homeostatic design that we find in creatures of all levels of complexity consists of: a collection of operation guidelines that must be followed for the organism to achieve its goals.” | Ibid., p 58, “Homeostatic design and its associated incentive and prediction devices protected the integrity of the living tissue inside an organism.” | Ibid., p 299, “Perhaps this is a good place for ritualized skill building, if that is what it takes.”
Wiener, N. (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin., hereafter cited as HUHB | p 33, “This last function, as we have seen, is called feedback, the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance. Feedback may be as simple as that of the common reflex, or it may be a higher order feedback, in which past experience is used not only to regulate specific movements, but also whole policies of behavior.
SCTM | p 56, “For the measurement to occur, the brain required a representation of (1) the current state of the living tissue, (2) the desirable state of the living tissue corresponding to the homeostatic goal, and (3) a simple comparison.”
Ibid., p 299, “What this possibly means is that merely training the non conscious process to politely decline is hardly a solution.”
Ibid., p299, “The nonconscious device must be trained by the conscious mind to deliver an emotional counterpunch.”
HS | p 141, “Memories are not mere records of the past. Biologically speaking, they are about the past but they are for the future. They are, all of them, in their essence, predictions aimed at meeting our needs.”
Stanley, E. A. (2019). Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma. New York: Avery., hereafter cited as WTW | p 178
Thank you for this. Less suffering, more flourishing, please!
This is such a relevant topic and I LOVE this approach as I haven't seen it explained from that angle. I must admit I struggled a little to follow along, but can't put my finger on why. Maybe the acronyms? In any case this is clearly valuable and I can't wait to learn more about it. Keep it up 🙌 Also such BEAUTIFUL visualizations 🖋️