When there’s a choice to make, most people will choose what they believe is in their best interest. And yet, how often do we see someone engaged in self-destructive behavior—making choices that are actually hurting, not helping, them?
In Protagoras, Socrates argues that one reason people do this is a lack of perspective. In deciding what we’re going to do, we’re weighing different factors. But in doing so, we can overestimate the short-term benefits or pleasure we might experience while underestimating the long-term effects our choices can have.
If you were trying to tell the difference in size between a building right in front of you and one far away, it might be hard to do so, depending on the distance involved. The closer one may appear larger than the one in the distance. But how much of the difference in apparent size is due to the actual dimensions of the buildings, and how much is due to where you’re standing?
Similarly, the long-term consequences of our actions, because they’re far away, aren’t as easy to see. We may not be thinking about them accurately—or even at all—and so we choose something that ultimately brings us more pain than pleasure because we’ve underestimated the long-term impact of that choice.
This is why considering the long-term implications of our actions is valuable. It doesn’t guarantee we’ll always make the best choice. But it can help us gain a better perspective than we would otherwise have. And the better our perspective, the better the odds of making choices we won’t later regret.