S. Casey O'Donnell, PhD

For most of us, thinking about the future is aspirational: we consider what we want to be like and what we don’t want to be like. But what’s that all about? Why bother when the present is knocking at the door? An answer to these questions lies in the psychology of identity.

I walk through some of these issues in O’Donnell & Oyserman, 2022. But here I provide my overarching view on what it means to consider the possible identities that may come to describe us in the future. These principles can guide a foundational understanding of what it takes to have students (or adults) consider what’s in store for them and what they might be doing (or not) about it.

The future is motivating when it seems like there’s something I can do now in response to what I think is coming.

Short-term goal setting and tracking is effortful and often depleting. That’s not what the future self is about. The future self is a guiding star amidst the fog.

The future self and it’s motivational power are not the same thing as career planning. Life happens. careers and motivations shift with time and experience. The future self is the thing that keeps us on some positive path while life happens. It’s not the full roadmap, but it provides important guideposts and destinations along the way.

Life inevitably brings challenge. Challenges are contextualized within the self writ-large and future identities specifically. They need not derail aspirations, but often do. Projecting our selves into the future can circumvent the negative spiral of interpreting challenges as an indication of identity or group fit.

No one is an island. The self and how we project it into the future depend on who we’re around, the groups we identify with, and the external constraints both in terms of concrete resource barriers and pernicious systematic racism. That’s why group-, institution-, and culture-level approaches are necessary. While individualized approaches have their merits, they miss opportunities in the realm of psychosocial engagement and culture.