Affective Forecasting

Today, I’m going to free you, from yourself. But, not you now, I’m going to free you from the you to come. The you from your future from you, that you have yet to meet, but our meeting every single day. I’m here to offer this freedom your self understanding.

The way I’m going to do this is by taking you through the exploration of emotions and habits. Because what rest at the seat of the seemingly common experiences, it’s actually your liberation waiting to experience itself. So, what is affective forecasting?

Affective forecasting is predicting how you will feel in the future. As it turns out, we’re terrible at it. We’re not good judges of what will make us happy, and we have trouble seeing through the filter of the now.

Our feelings in the present blind us to how we’ll make decisions in the future, when we might be feeling very differently.

One of the greatest victims of affective forecasting is the Explorer with in ourselves. That child who was so in a half of a night sky, that that young boy willing to risk it all to climb a tree.

That young child who is willing to step outside in a publicly viewed backyard and just and takes a nice long P. That’s a true story.

That was my son at the age of three, who didn’t really care who saw him. But this exemplifies the Innocence that seems to get so conveniently sacrificed in the name of the sustaining mediocrity.

We would so much rather live in a moment that has yet to happen, and emotionally exhausted ourselves-that in the end, we never actually get to experience because we short change ourselves.

We feel without feeling. We experience it without ever actually experiencing it. Because our presupposition of our emotional state imposes an experience that has yet to happen to us but that we assume will happen as we want it to.

At the center of all of this is this desire to be safe, the desire to control our atmosphere and environment.

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