Losing a friend and finding success: 2023 in reflection

As another year draws a little closer, I’ve begun to feel the effect that the start of a new year tends to have—the inflated promises of this new beginning and a peak in my motivation to enact positive change in my world. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as the “fresh start hypothesis;” the idea that temporal landmarks, like New Year’s Day or birthdays, can positively influence our aspirations and our decisions to act on them. While I don’t necessarily look back on 2023 with the same kind of na?ve optimism when I evaluate what I actually accomplished, surely 2024 will be different…right?

It’s profoundly easy to come to a conclusion like this—in fact, we all do it regularly. Behavioral economist Richard Thaler referred to our ability to picture ourselves in two seemingly different worlds: one in which our feet are firmly planted in the here and now, and one in which our future self indefinitely resides, as “temporal discounting”. These two selves aren’t necessarily completely different people. Our current and future selves may even share aligned desires—improving at our craft, getting in better shape, or finishing that project we all too easily set aside long ago. But our bias toward the behaviors that require the least effort now usually means our present selves more often enjoy the spoils in the moment, and often at the expense of our more intangible future selves. Much like planning the perfect future trip, the enjoyment of planning a meaningful change in our lives is met with open arms while conveniently assuming the work associated with it will be met with equal optimism by our future self.

Ok, so we cut our present self some slack here and there in order to have a little more enjoyment in the moment. Maybe we don’t always feel a sense of urgency to take meaningful steps toward our more audacious long-term goals. No harm done, right? I mean, there will always be next year. And as always, it will bring with it the promise of an exhilarating fresh start full of challenges that my future self will undoubtedly meet with greater readiness and enthusiasm than I’m able to this year. But while we’re on the subject of uncomfortable or laborious realities we avoid in the present moment, what about when the promise of the coming year turns out to be an assumption we’ve made in haste? Beautifully put in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, “…at some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.”

While I don’t think that anyone who knows me would consider me to have an unhealthy obsession with my own mortality, I do find that some experiences have begun to magnify this idea’s importance in my life. Like the act of temporal discounting or landmarking, certain occurrences seem to hold greater weight and spark a greater sense of immediacy to our thoughts about the future than the average day. In 2023, one such event occurred that brought the importance of the finite nature of this life to the forefront of my attention: the death of my friend and colleague, Jon O'Brien . To say that Jon’s passing was unexpected would be a gross understatement; to say that the absence it created was significant would be an even greater one. For weeks, I couldn’t help but think of Jon and just how perplexing the situation felt for me—how could this happen, and if it could, what does that even mean? Jon was someone I held in such high regard—as a researcher, as a colleague, as a leader, and as a friend.

My ultimate hope is that someday, I will leave behind the remnants of my own life that cause someone else to say the same about me. Perhaps my approach so far hasn’t been perfect—my advice is often flawed and I’m subject to the same shortcomings and fallibilities as anyone. But equally possible is that my own flaws or short-sighted suggestions were exactly what someone needed to hear in the present to encourage them to do more now and, in turn, be a little kinder to their future self. It is an idea I preach often to my students but remains a constant struggle in my life no matter how well I understand that using it as a guiding principle is what’s best for my life. The loss of my friend took my thoughts down many avenues, but considering my long-term goal of creating a lasting impact in others’ lives, I had to consider: is my present self making decisions with foresight that my future self will appreciate?

Dedicating an inordinate amount of time to this question has had a profound impact on my motivation to find a better balance between my present and future selves, and not always simply to the detriment of my present self. Admittedly, I’ve often been someone to sacrifice the present under the pretense that it will make things easier for me in the future. But while thinking more about this, I couldn’t help but question a foundational assumption on which I had always placed so much weight when deciding how to act: that doing more in the moment always leads to a future “win”. What about when sacrifice in the name of prudence leads to decisions that ultimately result in a loss for both my present and future selves? Opportunities for impact in the present can be lost when, like the proverbial squirrel, we become too fixated on storing acorns for the future. Much the same way, attempts at lasting impact will fail without any effort now—without some long-term focus, we treat everything as “better fit for another day.”

Although I would always prefer to come to these conclusions by other means, the time I spent with my friend Jon highlighted a few things to me as I close out another year. First is the importance of establishing a clear understanding of what it means for me to look back and say that “I succeeded”. Ralph Waldo Emerson said “…to laugh often and much…to earn the appreciation of honest critics…to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” I’m often tempted to tell myself that my success is about more than these intangibles, but as I think back on the life of my friend, my thoughts place very little emphasis on his academic and professional accomplishments. Rather, I think about standing and recording a Guns n’ Roses music video cover in the 2nd-floor atrium of the College of Business on a late Saturday afternoon, laughing as Jon nonchalantly paraded through the building in a Slash costume that would’ve made GnR proud.

Second is that our intangible sense of “tomorrow” that, depending on how we tend to operate, either causes us to work more today or more tomorrow, is not a guarantee and is never owed to us. This alone should be motivation to reconsider how we are using our time—both now and in the future. Sometimes, our future self can greatly benefit from us sacrificing our time now, and sometimes our future self will look back on our sacrifice and wonder why we placed such importance on something so trivial. I spent a good amount of time in the present with my friend doing things that never seemed like they had long-term importance—recording a music video, walking around the French Quarter in New Orleans, or debating the best 80s metal bands. At the time, they seemed insignificant but as I reflect on them, they were anything but. So, this year, my hope is that the temporal landmark that has held significance for my 2023 is more than an arbitrary event aligned with the Gregorian calendar. If for no other reason, my life will be better for remembering the ways that my friend’s life impacted me—something even the likes of Emerson would consider a “success”.