The brain is perennially odd about time. It defaults to hyper-dramatizing the present, glorifying the past, and devaluing the future. Related to declinism, a deception labeled present bias describes our propensity to blow out of proportion events that are currently happening while undervaluing what will come in a few years or even days. A 2015 UCLA psychology study found that people conceive of their future selves as strangers, which is why we often procrastinate our homework and put off saving for retirement. We find it hard to care about those random nobodies, even though they’re our
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