Do You Live in the Past, Present or Future?
Five time zones, and where you spend your attention
Everyone has a past, a present and a future, but people do not spend their attention on them equally. Some live in what was, warmly or bitterly. Some live in the next thing. Some are so much in the moment that consequences barely register, and some feel the moment is simply happening to them. The researchers who mapped this found five distinct orientations rather than three, because the past and the present each come in two flavours - and which one you carry predicts a surprising amount, from savings to risk-taking to how you handle a bad year.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Fifteen questions, three per orientation. Answer about how you usually are, not about the week you are having.
What it measures
The five time perspectives from the original inventory: past-positive (warm nostalgia), past-negative (regret and old injuries), present-hedonistic (pleasure now), present-fatalistic (nothing I do changes anything) and future (plans, consequences, deferred rewards). The healthiest profile in the research is not one of them but a particular mix.
Based on: Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999)
Possible results
Past, warmly
Nostalgia, tradition, the good old days.
Past, painfully
Regret, old injuries, what should have gone differently.
Present, for pleasure
Now is what there is, and now is good.
Present, resigned
Whatever I do, it makes no difference.
Future
Plans, consequences, and the reward you are waiting for.
Common questions
Which time perspective is best?
None of them on its own. The researchers' answer was a mix they called balanced: warm about the past, engaged with the present, oriented to the future, and low on the two dark orientations. The idea is that each perspective fits some situations and not others - the future for planning, the present for the people in front of you, the past for who you are - and the skill is switching between them rather than living in one. People stuck in a single perspective, even a good one, do worse than people who can move.
Can I change how I relate to time?
The two dark bars move most, and they move by being noticed. Past-negative shrinks when you catch the present being read through an old lens; present-fatalistic shrinks when one small action produces one visible result, because the belief that effort changes nothing cannot survive much evidence. The future bar rises with any habit that makes tomorrow concrete - a written plan, a date, a number. The present-hedonistic one is the hardest to raise on purpose, and the research suggests the route is scheduling pleasure rather than waiting to feel like it.
Sources
- Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (1999). Putting time in perspective: A valid, reliable individual-differences metric. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of an inventory that has fifty-six items, so each of the five bars here rests on three questions and should be read as a sketch. The five-factor structure has been reproduced in many countries, though the exact boundaries between factors shift somewhat from sample to sample, and shorter versions of the inventory have found that some of the five are more robust than others. The findings about which profile is healthiest are correlational and come mostly from students, and the balanced profile is a description of what tends to go with wellbeing rather than a prescription. One more thing: time perspective moves with circumstances. A period of hardship pushes people towards the fatalistic bar and a period of grief towards the past-negative one, so a result taken in a bad season describes the season as much as the person.
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