The Problem With Being Smart as We Are

There's actually a term for this kind of trick we play on ourselves: prognostic myopia. The human mind, just like all animal minds, is designed to solve problems in the present or the immediate future. But even though intellectually I understand about the distant future, my brain and emotional responses are really tuned to the present. This makes it hard to make good decisions for the future because those are simply intellectual. They don't have a lot of emotion behind them,. Because all of our emotion is about satisfying our present conditions, our present problems.