Time: It's On My Side

Here's a link to a presentation by Philip Zimbardo concerning time perspectives. This supports part of what I've put together as a combination of stages, changes in brain potentials, self-identities, and attentional abilities.

The developmental part--approximately 11-15 minutes into the video--covers generic differences in time perspectives across a lifespan. When we're young, we're present-oriented. As we grow up, we learn future orientation and past orientation. The more educated we are, the less present-oriented we become. If we're lower-class economically or in a politically unstable situation, we stay more present-oriented. Zimbardo's basic point is that there is an optimal time perspective that involves some past, present, and future orientation along with some degrees of optimism and skepticism.

An interesting point is that, as we get into the age-range that defines the stage of Understanding, we become less present-oriented while we're learning theories and complex systems of logic, social organization, and ideals. Further down the road--as all that new prefrontal growth during adolescence has also been pruned, after some of the raging hormone storms die down a bit--we shift back towards present-orientation to a greater degree. Raising children encourages and also forces this to some extent.

Part of what Zimbardo gets into, then, is that as adults we have enough perspective to look to optimize what we focus on. This is Mindful Appreciation, but since most people don't make the mindfulness or the appreciation explicit, they often mush themselves partially into this stage without really grasping it decisively. That's not surprising since they are, to some extent, leaving the conceptual ideals--the absolutes--of the stage of Understanding behind to some extent. (Maybe mitigating or contextualizing the ideals is a better way of saying it.)

Mindfulness, though, allows us to put a sharper edge on those ideals and apply them less often (or more appropriately) as an option to putting a duller edge on ideals or hiding them away in a certain cynical/cosmopolitan embarrassment of our adolescent idealism. When mindfulness is applied with an explicit awareness of the desire to include appreciation, we can choose to modify realistic potential over fighting for unreasonable ideals.