It’s not entirely our fault. Partly because our brains evolved at a time when the future itself was perilous, we human beings are notoriously bad at wrapping our minds around far-off events. Our biases point us toward the present. So when given a choice between an immediate reward (say, $1,000 right now) and a reward we have to wait for ($1,150 in two years), we’ll often take the former even when it’s in our own interest to choose the latter.
