Moving Through Time
One of the most pressing challenges facing individuals and societies is the question of how to
balance immediate gratification and longer-term well-being. These intertemporal tradeoffs guide
whether people save for retirement or spend more today, preserve or exploit environmental
resources, remain faithful to or cheat on their spouses, and many other critical decisions.
Previous research has tried to understand these problems by focusing on how people treat present
and future rewards. I review a growing body of work that takes a different approach, looking at
how individuals perceive their place in time, and how such perceptions affect consequential
choices. I find that when the emotional gap between the current and future self is large, when the
end of a personal decade looms near, and when the shadow of the past fails to illuminate a
lengthy distant horizon, people are likely to make choices that are present- rather than futureoriented.