A brand new enterprise caught my eye this weekend, in a narrative of 4 tech-entrepreneur siblings who’re within the means of elevating cash from buyers. However that is no odd fundraising spherical. Reasonably than promoting shares in a traditional firm, the Libermans are promoting shares in themselves.

If this concept strikes you as uncomfortably harking back to occasions when it was commonplace for individuals to be traded as property, I’m proper there with you. However sinister as it could sound, it’s price remembering that the Libermans are doing this of their very own volition. Moreover, they imagine that what they name a “Individuals Firm” — which they hope to drift on the inventory trade — is not going to solely profit them financially: it might additionally “stem 21st-century inequality”.

I ought to come clear straight away: I feel that could be a naive and silly concept and it’ll do nothing of the type. The notion that turning individuals into holding corporations will in some way make the remainder of the world extra equal smacks of a very dopey and deluded type of techno-utopianism, and it shouldn’t be taken terribly significantly. Nor are the Libermans the primary to think about this.

However I do assume it’s price exploring the separation of the current self from that of the previous and future. The supposed worth of “Libermans Co” derives not solely from the income of the siblings’ present endeavours, but additionally from the cash they’ll make over the following 30 years. The thought is that Daniil, David, Anna and Maria, who grew up in poverty in Moscow, ought to have the ability to profit not simply from their present selves, however from their future variations too.

This raises the difficulty of what the New Yorker describes in its article concerning the enterprise as “longitudinal inequality”: the concept that our present system is unfair on our youthful selves, who need to toil away on little or no whereas solely our older selves profit financially. However are we positive we might be serving to these youthful selves by giving them wealth earlier than that they had actually earned it? Would they be motivated if we did, and would their eventual success be as rewarding?

In any case, watching any Hollywood blockbuster will let you know that the human mind yearns for a sure narrative: hardship adopted by a contented ending. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes in his 2011 guide Pondering, Quick and Sluggish, we bear in mind — and due to this fact choose — an expertise based mostly not on the sum whole of the feelings or emotions it contained, however reasonably on any specific peaks or troughs and, specifically, the way it ended: the so-called “peak-end rule”.

There’s a battle of pursuits, Kahneman explains, between the “experiencing self”, who’s topic to ache and pleasure when it’s occurring, and the “remembering self”. It seems that not solely is the remembering self reasonably poor on the remembering; it additionally has little empathy for the experiencing self. “The experiencing self doesn’t have a voice,” writes Kahneman. “What we be taught from the previous is to maximise the qualities of our future recollections, not essentially of our future expertise. That is the tyranny of the remembering self.”

This concept may really feel acquainted to anybody who has seen the sensible collection Severance, during which some individuals have chosen to have a chip fitted into their brains that makes them unable to recollect their work life once they depart the workplace, and vice versa. What this implies, in impact, is that they change into two completely different individuals — the “outie”, who earns a wage regardless of by no means being conscious of doing any work, and the “innie”, who’s eternally trapped within the office, by no means to take pleasure in any of the monetary rewards of their labour.

With out giving the plot away, a few of these “innies” sense a scarcity of empathy from their respective “outies”, who confined them to a lifetime of unrewarded servitude. Having no reminiscence of their working selves in any respect, they’ve successfully deemed these experiencing beings as irrelevant.

In fact, recollections of earlier experiences contribute to how we really feel within the current, so we shouldn’t dismiss their worth solely, even when they’re unfavorable. However what we will be taught from all that is that we ought to be cautious about how unrepresentative recollections could be and use that consciousness to information our decision-making. That may assist us deal with our experiencing selves with extra compassion.

In some methods, what the Libermans are attempting to do is to “hack” the peak-end rule by smoothing out their very own highs and lows over a lifetime. However they’re sidelining the psychological richness that may come from the number of expertise, together with struggling. Moreover, as Severance demonstrates, it’s tough to make selections for our numerous selves, once we don’t all the time know what these others need.

jemima.kelly@ft.com