Here’s a thought experiment you’ll come across on social media:

Imagine your 80-year-old self looking back at the day you're having right now.

What would they give to inhabit your body again, to have your knees that don't ache, your schedule that seems so overwhelmingly full, your problems that feel so urgent?

Like most self-help advice, there’s a kernel of psychological insight here + several layers of motivated reasoning.

But unlike most self-help advice, the core mechanism actually checks out when you look at what we know about how humans experience time, value, and regret.

Start with the empirical observation that people's biggest regrets tend to cluster around inaction rather than action. When psychologists survey people about their life regrets, they find a consistent pattern: in the short term, people regret things they did. In the long term, people regret things they didn't do. The embarrassing thing you said at the party haunts you for weeks. The career you never pursued, the relationship you never tried to fix, the year abroad you never took - these haunt you for decades.

This makes sense if you understand how memory and emotion interact over time. Psychologists call it the "fading affect bias" - the emotional intensity of negative memories decays faster than positive ones. The mortifying moment loses its sting. The road not taken becomes more vivid, more tantalizing, precisely because it never happened. Your imagination fills in all the blanks with the best possible outcomes, while your actual experiences get remembered with all their messy complications intact.

We have an overwhelming tendency to value future rewards less than immediate ones, and conversely, to value past experiences less than current ones. When you're 25 and your back hurts after moving furniture, you don't think "thank god I can still move furniture." When you're 80 and can't move furniture, you remember when you could and the memory has a different texture entirely.

We have pretty good data on what actually happens to people's subjective wellbeing as they age. The U-shaped curve of happiness is one of the most robust findings in social science: people report being happiest in their twenties, hit a low point somewhere in their forties or fifties, and then happiness increases again in later life. The interpretation of this finding is contested - are older people actually happier or just better at regulating their emotions? Do they compare themselves to worse alternatives or have they genuinely figured something out?

Whatever the mechanism, older people consistently report higher life satisfaction than middle-aged people, which complicates the simple narrative that your 80-year-old self is sitting around in wistful jealousy of your younger incarnation. Laura Carstensen's socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that as people's time horizons shrink, they shift their priorities toward emotional satisfaction and away from future-oriented goals. Old people aren't necessarily pining for youth; they're often quite content being old.

Does this mean the thought experiment is useless? Not quite.

Its value is in what it reveals about your current priorities. When you imagine an elderly version of yourself looking back, you're running a sort of values clarification exercise. You're asking which parts of your current life would seem precious from a distance, which anxieties would seem trivial, which opportunities would seem worth taking.

The economist Bryan Caplan talks about "hedonic adaptation" - our tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness after positive or negative events. Win the lottery and within a year you're about as happy as you were before...

We're remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy because we forget how quickly we adapt to new circumstances.

But hedonic adaptation works in reverse too. We adapt to our current circumstances so thoroughly that we forget they once seemed amazing. The first time you could afford to eat at a nice restaurant whenever you wanted, it felt like luxury. After a few years, it's just dinner. Your first apartment without roommates was a revelation. Now you barely notice it. This is where the 80-year-old perspective becomes genuinely useful - it reminds you that your baseline is extraordinary compared to what many humans throughout history experienced, and compared to what future you might have.

Maybe you can walk up stairs without thinking about it. Maybe you can read for hours without your eyes getting tired. Maybe you can stay up past 9 PM without feeling like you're dying. Maybe people still want to hire you, date you, collaborate with you. Maybe you still have the energy to pursue projects that seem pointless to everyone else. These capabilities have an expiration date, and you probably won't know when they've expired until well after the fact.

Simply knowing this doesn't automatically make you appreciate things more. Gratitude isn't something you can will into existence through rational argument alone. If it were, reading studies about hedonic adaptation would make everyone permanently happy. What the thought experiment actually offers is a frame - a way of seeing your current situation that makes certain features more salient. It's cognitive reappraisal, which is one of the more effective emotion regulation strategies we have.

Does your 80-year-old self really envy the day you're having? Probably not as much as the thought experiment suggests. They might be quite satisfied with their senior citizen discount and their lack of workplace drama. But would they look back on certain days - certain ordinary, unremarkable days - and wish they'd paid more attention? Would they want to tell you something about which worries actually matter and which don't?

Almost certainly yes.

The arbitrage opportunity here is real. You can trade your current anxiety about mundane problems for a “borrowed” perspective that lets you see those problems as they actually are: temporary, survivable, often forgettable. You can recognize that having problems to solve, having energy to worry, having a future to fret about - these are luxuries that won't last forever. The exchange rate between present experience and future memory is almost never in your favor, which means that right now, in this moment, you're probably undervaluing what you have.

You don't need to be grateful for everything.

Some days genuinely suck.

Some problems really matter.

But most days contain at least a few elements that future you would miss, if only you could train yourself to notice them now. The person you'll be in 50 years might not give everything to have today back, but they'd probably give something. The question is whether you can cash in on that future regret now, while you still have time to enjoy the things you'll eventually wish you'd enjoyed more.

Patti Smith said it best: