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On the Later That Never Arrives

Dr. Emma Smith and Dr. Alivia Stehlik on Heidegger, bad predictions, and why prevention never feels as urgent as crisis — until it is.

Summary

There is a version of this conversation happening in your body right now, in the gap between the thing you keep meaning to do and the version of “later” you are waiting on to do it. The couples counseling you’re circling. The physical therapy exercises sitting undone. The relationship conversation you keep filing under not yet, not this season. Later is supposed to be easier. Later never actually arrives on those terms.

Focus of the Episode

The tension this episode sits inside is a prediction problem.

We are, it turns out, remarkably bad at forecasting how something will feel before we do it — not just whether we’ll get around to it, but how good the doing will actually feel once we’re inside it. That miscalculation is quietly running a lot of expensive decisions: the inpatient hospital stay that followed years of care nobody could access, the injury that shows up requiring the exact physical therapy work that would have prevented it, the relationship conversation postponed until the postponing becomes its own kind of damage. Heidegger’s contribution to being-in-time is useful here — we are not sitting inside a clock, watching time pass us externally. We are moving alongside it, acting now based on where we came from and where we imagine we’re going, even when that imagining is unreliable.

Multiple lenses

What we explore in this episode starts with that unreliability. Dr. Alivia brings the physical therapy lens — the population she works with tends to overestimate their own physical capacity, then inaccurately predict how much a pushed limit will cost them afterward. Dr. Emma brings the inpatient mental health lens — years spent on an acute care ward learning that most of the people there hadn’t refused help so much as miscalculated the space they’d have to access it before crisis made the decision for them. Depression complicates the prediction problem further: when someone is inside a depressive episode, the emotional forecast for “this will feel rewarding” comes in flat, not because the reward isn’t real, but because the impairment itself blocks the ability to predict it accurately.

You’re on Your Own Out Here

The second half of the conversation turns toward relationships specifically — the strange fact that we get formal training for nearly every domain of adult competence except the one most of us will spend the most years inside. No apprenticeship for merging two “original factory settings.”

No mentorship for the conversations poly and monogamous couples both need and only one group is taught to expect. Preventative relationship work — the kind that happens before there’s a problem, not after — remains culturally coded as intervention rather than as something you build in from the start, the way you’d build in physical therapy before the injury instead of after it. The episode closes on a reframe worth sitting with longer than a single listen allows: that the goodness we’re forecasting so poorly may not live in the result we’re waiting for at all. It may live in the engagement itself, ongoing, not deferred.

If you have ever told yourself you’ll get to the harder conversation once things calm down — this conversation is for you.

The question worth carrying past this episode isn’t whether you’re right that later will be easier. It’s this: what would it mean to stop trying to predict how ready you’ll be, and start noticing that the readiness was never really the thing you were waiting on?

Moments Worth Noting

“Tissues heal.”

“We are inextricably connected to it.”

“The same work that would keep you from getting injured is the work that we have to do to recover you from injury.”

“We don’t get any training on this.”

“Maybe the doing of things — the engagement over time in something — is actually what drives goodness.”

Chapters

• 00:00 — Introduction and Personal Reflections
• 04:55 — The Concept of Time in Our Lives
• 09:51 — Predicting Future Emotions and Experiences
• 12:30 — The Impact of Depression on Motivation
• 16:43 — Procrastination and Future Planning
• 20:33 — The Importance of Preventative Care in Relationships
• 24:55 — Creating Healthy Relationship Cultures
• 28:57 — Time and Healing in Physical Therapy
• 32:04 — Engagement Over Results: A New Perspective
• 34:19 — Upcoming Events and Conclusion

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The Receipts

If you love when things get EXTRA nerdy, this section of the show notes is for you!

Podcast Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/theintimatephilosopherpodcast/

Dr. Emma is hosting a free virtual masterclass this August on investing in your relationship before crisis makes the decision for you. Join the waitlist to be the first to know the date: Join the List

Nashville friends: Dr. Emma will be speaking at Stimulate, a sexual wellness symposium downtown on August 3rd on the philosophy of pleasure in the 21st century.

Support for the show

The show is made possible in part by Nine to Kind Planners — a tool Dr. Emma actually uses to stay organized without it becoming another thing to manage. Explore at ninetokind.com, code EMMA20 for 20% off.

Keywords: relationships, curiosity, intimacy, dating, connection, late-in-life virginity, vulnerability, desire, communication