Why People Need Help Envisioning their Futures

Not everyone is good at thinking about the future. The question is why?

A team of behavioral researchers in 2007 showed that the decisions we make for our future-selves are more similar to the decisions we make for other people and significantly different from the decisions we make for ourselves right now [1]. What this means is that we are more concerned about, and more invested in, the person we are right now than we are for the person we will be in the future. This is called Temporal Discounting [2]. We discount the future. We tend to not think about the needs, wants, and values of the person we will become because that’s not who we are right now. Another research team built on this study, this time using MRI technologies to observe changes in brain activity. Their findings suggest that the connection with our future-self weakens as the time horizon increases: further out, less connection [3]. This is called Self-Continuity [4]. The further out we envision the future, the more likely we are to view our future-selves as someone else. Why does this matter? It’s rather straightforward: the decisions you make and the actions you take will shape the conditions of your life and the options available to you in the future.

In 2016 the Institute for the Future conducted a survey with 28 hundred US adults [5]. Their findings suggest that more than 60% of the people we live and work with do not regularly think about their lives five years out. Many of us make important decisions and take consequential actions every day with little or no consideration of the foreseeable future. And, when we do think about our future, we may not think of it as our own. Hopefully it’s only those who regularly think about the future who are making all the important decisions. Clearly that’s not the case.

Many of the challenges with the environment, the economy, our culture, our government, our politics, and more are due in large part to a chronic lack of a coherent vision for the future. Think about the problems we face as individuals, as a community, as a country and as inhabitants of planet Earth: How many of these problems seem preventable if we had made decisions based on an effective, well thought-out vision of the future?

Hindsight is 20/20, but we’re moving forward in time, not backwards. There is a clear need to develop and deploy techniques to overcome the deleterious effects of temporal discounting and disconnecting from our future selves.

1. Pronin, E., Olivola, C. Y., & Kennedy, K. A. (2008). Doing Unto Future Selves As You Would Do Unto Others: Psychological Distance and Decision Making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(2), 224–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167207310023
2. Chapman, G. B. (1996). Temporal Discounting and Utility for Health and Money. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(3), 771–791. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.22.3.771
3. Ersner - Hershfield, H., Wimmer, G. E., & Knutson, B. (2009). Saving for the future self: Neural measures of future self-continuity predict temporal discounting. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(1), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn042
4. Hershfield, H. E. (2011). Future self‐continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 12351(1), 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06201.x
5. IFTF: The American Future Gap Survey. (2017). Retrieved March 18, 2019, from http://www.iftf.org/americanfuturegap/