Many of the most serious problems we face are the result of our tendency to focus on the present at the expense of the future. But we can escape this temporal myopia by confronting how we think about time

By Richard Fisher

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The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the worlds longest bridge at just under 24 miles long, near New Orleans, Louisiana and shot from an altitude of about 1000 feet during a helicopter photo flight.

IN 1981, Kent Cochrane was in a motorcycle crash that left him with an unusual brain injury, one that transformed his perception of time. Later, he was visited by psychologists. “What will you be doing tomorrow?” one asked. “I don’t know,” Cochrane replied. “Do you remember the question?” the psychologist said. “About what I’ll be doing tomorrow?” “Yes. How would you describe your state of mind when you think about it?” Cochrane paused. “Blank, I guess.”

The psychologists realised that Cochrane couldn’t form a mental picture of any time outside his present. When asked how that felt, he described it as “like swimming in the middle of a lake. There’s nothing there to hold you up or do anything with.”

Cochrane had lost the faculty of mental time travel: the ability to transport the mind to the past or future. We are lucky to have this talent. It means we can remember our best experiences and make detailed plans for tomorrow. It may even have supercharged humanity’s evolutionary success. Yet it is an imperfect skill. We can still get stuck in the present, distracted by the near-term. So why do we struggle to take a long-term perspective?

For the past five years, I have been trying to answer this question while researching a book called The Long View. I argue that societies are in danger of becoming “time-blinkered”, which is worse than simple short-termism: it is a present-focused view so embedded that it goes unnoticed. The good news is that we can escape this trap – if only we understand the factors that shape how we think about time.

In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have converged on the idea that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences underpins some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, antibiotic resistance, income inequality, the risk of nuclear war, and more. The historian François Hartog argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now”.

It is well established that people have a bias towards the present, focusing on salient attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves, community or descendants. In business and finance, this bias surfaces as short-sighted corporate decisions. In politics, it is the way governments ignore the lessons of history and the future consequences of their policies. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it manifests as the unwillingness to make small sacrifices today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, winning the election or sating some other near-term desire.

These time-blinkered perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. I call these “temporal habits”.

People’s reluctance to delay gratification is the most obvious example, but there are others. One is the “availability heuristic”, which describes how the most accessible information in the present skews decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming”. Another is “salience bias”, where loud and urgent distractions seem disproportionately important, nudging people to ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when the tweets of Elon Musk draw far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.

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The human mind is bad at noting slow change. As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once quipped, if invading aliens wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships, they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to creeping environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective amnesia called “shifting baseline syndrome”. It is so named because each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with bug-splattered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect abundance has plummeted.

A final, subtle temporal habit involves the words we use to describe the past or future. In English and other languages, we talk about the longer-term future as being “far” or “distant”, as if it were a foreign land. The psychologists Nira Liberman, now at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and Yaacov Trope at New York University say that this has a psychological distancing effect, meaning people become less concerned about the details of what happens there.

In their original 2008 paper on the phenomenon, the pair used Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Breugel the Elder’s 16th-century painting, to highlight this discrepancy. In the foreground, a farmer ploughs on, ignoring the death of Icarus in the background, his legs flailing in the ocean. The physical distance makes his plight less tangible. Map this onto people’s attitudes to climate change, and it is easier to see how future consequences get ignored. If it is “far”, as in over the horizon, then it is less salient. The future, however, isn’t distant at all: our grandchildren may well live in the same city or country as we do – and certainly will inherit the same planet.

None of these temporal habits would be impossible to mitigate if brought into the open. However, they have also been amplified by a host of subtle incentives and deterrents that collectively discourage the long view. I call these “temporal stresses”.

It isn’t hard to find more case studies where people in business took ill-advised shortcuts to satisfy targets. Historian Jerry Muller, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, calls this “metric fixation”. To illustrate that the problem goes far beyond business, he points out that when New York introduced scorecards for cardiologists, which publicised their surgery mortality rate, many doctors stopped operating on sicker, riskier patients.

Bad incentives also drive short-termism in politics. In my book, I tell the story of David Stockman, a member of US president Ronald Reagan’s administration who got himself into hot water in the 1980s over his unwillingness to support a social security reform that would have played out over many years. Instead, he favoured short-term cuts, and he was transparent about his reasons. “I’m just not going to spend a lot of political capital on some other guy’s problem in 2010,” he told reporters. The truth is there are few upsides for politicians to make costly sacrifices that benefit future administrations. And in an age of social media and 24-hour news, populism thrives. As former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker once said about political decisions: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

At this point, we could be forgiven for feeling despondent. It seems difficult to see how these temporal habits, and the stresses that exacerbate them, might be broken. Yet various studies suggest that it is possible to encourage a longer perspective. Based on this research, I argue that we each have a “timeview” – a way of thinking about our place within the past, present and future that defines our priorities and decisions. Some individuals are more long-minded than others, and some societies and cultures too. But timeviews aren’t fixed.

Consider the inability to delay gratification. In 2017, Bettina Lamm at the University of Osnabruck in Germany and her colleagues invited two sets of children from Germany and Cameroon to take the famous marshmallow test, where participants must choose between eating one immediately, or holding out for two. Lamm found the Cameroonian children, from a rural farming community, were more likely to wait for a second marshmallow than the German kids. Another study found that children in the test were more likely to show restraint when asked to wear a green shirt and told that green-shirt wearers wait for their marshmallows. These studies suggest that social circumstances can foster a longer view.

This dovetails with the research of the late Geert Hofstede, a psychologist who was at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and who showed that more individualist nations, like the US or Australia, have less of a long-term orientation than collectivist societies like Japan or China. Hofstede’s descriptions are broad brushstrokes, maybe even stereotypes, but he nonetheless argued that his surveys reflect a country’s dominant cultural norms.

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Whereas Japanese people might tend to “see their life as a very short moment in a long history of mankind”, for example, people in the US are more likely to prioritise other guiding frameworks, such as “liberty and justice for all”. This US mindset has many positives, but it may have fostered a free-market culture that enabled corporate short-termism to develop unchecked. Japan, by contrast, is known for a business culture that places more emphasis on longevity and tradition.

There is also tentative evidence that some languages encourage a longer view. It is far from established that language can direct people’s thoughts, as some have claimed – but it does ask us to express concepts in different ways, possibly steering cultural norms. People whose tongues have a weak future tense – such as German, Japanese, Mandarin and most of the Scandinavian languages – talk of the future as closer. So, to describe tomorrow’s weather in Mandarin, you would say míng tian xia yu – “tomorrow fall rain”, not “tomorrow it will rain”, which is a strong future tense. A decade ago, economist Keith Chen at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that weak future speakers were 31 per cent more likely to put money into savings, had accumulated 39 per cent more wealth by retirement and were 29 per cent more likely to exercise.

Subsequent research has described a correlation with pro-environmental behaviours, while other studies revealed that corporations led by speakers who use a weak future tense displayed a greater willingness to save and to invest in R&D. It is possible that other cultural differences played a role, but the correlation has been observed in a number of studies. For example, in one clever study that revealed this pattern, weak and strong future speakers lived side by side in a bilingual Italian town amid similar economic circumstances.

Even within a single culture, nation and language, some people are more or less present-focused than others – and this may be a learned behaviour. Using a test called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in California, and his colleague John Boyd, identified striking differences between timeviews on the individual level, which he and other researchers have since shown can influence people’s outlook and life choices. Some people are more past-oriented, some present-focused and others are more future-motivated. (You can discover your own weighting on thetimeparadox.com.)

Very broadly, people with a pronounced future perspective are more likely to be forward-planners, to floss and eat healthily, to do well academically and to embrace pro-environmental attitudes. Past-oriented people are more likely to be (small-c) conservatives, concerned with maintaining tradition or family values. Finally, present-oriented people are, obviously, strongly influenced by what they do and experience in the moment.

Zimbardo also showed that our timeviews can be coloured by optimism or pessimism. So, for example, people scoring high on “present-hedonism” in the inventory are more focused on near-term pleasures, while a strong “present-fatalism” result implies a lack of agency: a doomist outlook that can lead to apathy and hopelessness.

Importantly, we can change our time perspective. People given mindfulness training reduced their present-fatalism scores. Researchers have also boosted people’s future perspective by asking them to write what they would want said about themselves in their eulogy, or to imagine being 90-years-old, in a rocking chair, reflecting on their life choices.

This “perspective taking” seems to be a powerful way of fostering a longer view. The idea is to encourage people to mentally time travel to reflect on the experience of specific individuals in the past or future – themselves or others. When economist Tatsuyoshi Saijo at Kochi University of Technology, Japan, asked people to interact with someone role-playing as an “imaginary future person” or to dress ceremonially as citizens of the year 2060 while discussing political policies, they were subsequently more empathetic and generous towards future generations. Likewise, when other researchers asked people to reflect on what past generations had sacrificed – fighting wars or enduring hardship, for instance – they were more likely to feel a sense of moral obligation towards future generations.

Unlike Kent Cochrane after his accident, we have the remarkable ability to move our minds between the past, present and future. But to use this faculty to its full extent, we might take a cue from geologist Marcia Bjornerud at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, who writes of the importance of “timefulness”. She defines this as the “acute consciousness of how the world is made by – indeed, made of – time”.

Viewing the world through such a temporal lens could help us heed the lessons of history, navigate the most serious challenges we face today and look ahead to possible futures with greater clarity, generosity and even hope. Ultimately, if we want to chart a route out of our tumultuous century – steering our fate rather than stumbling into tomorrow – we need to unlock a longer view.

Richard Fisher is author of The Long View: Why we need to transform how the world sees time, out on 30 March, and a senior journalist for BBC Future.