The future isn’t real. It’s made up of a bundle of possibilities that exist only in our minds. Those possibilities tend to be idealized—we usually don’t imagine a mediocre outcome. We tend to think about the best of all possible worlds, and that makes the future more attractive. On the other hand, the present is real. It’s concrete. It’s experienced, not imagined, and that requires a different set of brain chemicals—the H&Ns, the here-and-now neurotransmitters.
