Being in Time

- “It’s striking to think that the past has weight not just because it influences the future but because it has its own intrinsic value.”

- “She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives the past, the present, and the future equal weight.”

- “[Meghan] Sullivan is mainly concerned with how we relate to time as individuals, and she thinks that many of us do it poorly, because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should happen.”

- “The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds …. Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window.”

- “When making decisions about life right now, we often apply different standards to ourselves than to other people—but, when we make decisions about our future selves, we use the same standards. Thinking about our future selves has even been shown to resemble third-person thinking at the neural level.”

- “We undertake activities that we know to be difficult or unpleasant because we see them as part of a good life and wish to think back upon them in the future. We curate our presents to furnish our futures with the right kinds of pasts.”

- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”