How to Make the Future Feel Present

My son said something that stopped me in my tracks: “You know we’re closer to 2070 than 1970, right?”

2070 sounds like science fiction, while 1970 sounds like history. But 2070 is closer.

The disconnect between how far away the future feels versus how far away it actually is matters. We put off things that matter for the future (a checkup, maintenance, saving for retirement) but don’t feel pressing right now.

Willpower isn’t the reason; it’s thinking. Economists who combed through tens of millions of car sales found that the average buyer, offered a dollar of guaranteed fuel savings down the road, will pay only about 76 cents for it today. And a quarter of buyers appeared to barely account for fuel at all.

But there are things you can do. In one set of experiments, people looked at a digitally aged photograph of their own face, met the person they would grow into, and then chose how much to set aside for retirement. The ones who had seen their own face, but aged, saved more. Once their future self had a face, their behavior changed.

Show the present cost

The first technique: show the present impact.

Here is a claim in the future tense. The number of people exposed to flooding is on track to roughly double between 2010 and 2030, according to the World Resources Institute. True, serious, and easy to file under “later.”

Here is the same problem in the present tense. In Florida, home insurance premiums rose about 75 percent between 2021 and 2025, roughly twice the national increase, as insurers repriced storm and flood risk.

Although premium growth has leveled off, Florida now leads the country in policies that insurers simply decline to renew. The question has expanded: not only what coverage costs but whether you can even get it.

That is not a 2030 problem. It is arriving in (non-)renewal notices now. Insurance is often the clearest place to watch this happen, but the pattern holds even where no policy exists. Anywhere tomorrow’s risk is priced into today’s cost you are likely to see the present cost of a future problem.

Shorten the distance

The second leaves the facts untouched but changes how close they feel.

A few years ago, I finally got to see the Great Barrier Reef. It was awesome. But its future is not.

The scientific description of its future: the IPCC projects that at 2 degrees Celsius of warming, more than 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs are lost, with severe die-off likely by mid-century.

Here is the same fact, made personal to change the distance: When my children are my age, the reef I visited will likely be gone.

Same science, different feeling. The “when my kids are my age” does for a reader what the aged photograph did in the lab. It turns the future from something a stranger inhabits into the home of someone you know.

Why it works

One of these techniques turns the future into a cost you are already personally paying, while the other turns it into something paid by a loved one.

Try these. Pick something you have been putting off and find the bill it is already running up somewhere. Then find the person who will inherit what you do, or what you don’t do, and picture them.

2070 is closer than it sounds. Make it feel that way.