As humans we tend to act on what is immediately in front of us. The further out the consequence of an action is, the less we seem to feel it viscerally. This can be seen in the different ways we market credit cards and insurance. Credit cards promise us something now (things and cash) with consequences that only follow later (payments with interest). Because of this, credit cards hardly need to be marketed at all. Now that the industry is saturated, there is competitive marketing, but Homo Sapiens need no convincing to spend money that they don’t currently have.
Insurance on the other hand promises just the opposite. With insurance, you spend money now for protection against calamity in the future. Because of this, there is a massive industry around insurance sales, so much so, that the insurance salesman has become the very archetype of the sales profession. In fact, insurance is such a counter-intuitive proposition for humans that auto and now medical insurance both have to be mandated by law to help us accept this very inhuman way of thinking.
Why we value the present so much more than the future isn’t entirely known, but I suspect there are at least two mechanisms. First, the parts of our brains that focus on immediate rewards are more ancient than the relatively new machinery that can reason out future consequences. This sets up a brain divided. Almost every human being has felt this internal conflict and experienced both the perils of losing this battle between now and later as well as the exultation of making a decision for our long-term benefit in spite of the current sacrifice required to achieve it.
Another less discussed reason, however, that we value immediate rewards more than those in the future is that the future-brain knows that one day, we the thinker, shall no longer be. In this way, the mental machinery that helps us deny this ultimate consequence also atrophies the extraordinarily valuable processes that help us resist superficial urges in order to achieve long-term goals.
Finally, no matter what we currently think we believe about death, we already know that death is coming for us. Our minds may be hard at work keeping us distracted, but somewhere our probability calculator has already done the math. Whether we want to believe it or not, our brains can’t help but know the truth, and by fleeing this reality, our brain taints every living moment with a sense of dread, the cause of which we can’t quite touch.
Addiction, procrastination, and anxiety–these are the hallmarks of a mind unwilling to look into the future. Although I’d love to tell you that, as a Thanatist, you will no longer feel this internal conflict and consistently and effortlessly make sacrifices in the present to facilitate future gain, sadly, even a core belief as powerful as the acceptance of our own mortality can’t free us entirely from one of the core conundrums of human existence. I can say, however, that by accepting death, and developing some of the practices we shall discuss later, you will develop a certain predisposition to think longer term. In doing so, Thanatism cleanses our thoughts of the uneasiness we can’t quite place, and enables us to more easily divert our ancient obsession with the immediate toward that which will ultimately make for a better life.