A story about later, told today

Two young men in Asyut start their first jobs in the same month and are paid on the same day. One spends the evening out with friends, and most of the money with it. The other goes out too, but first moves a small share into an account he tries not to look at.

It would be easy to credit the second one with foresight. I doubt foresight has much to do with it. Nobody at twenty-three can feel what it is like to be sixty. That older man is a stranger, and the evening with friends is tonight.

What the second one has is a story about who he is right now. In his house, money was set aside the day it arrived, and he would feel faintly ashamed if he did otherwise. That shame does not live in the future. It is here, on payday, as sharp as the pull of the evening out.

That is the whole mechanism. What presses now beats what waits later, almost without exception, and the future only wins when something turns it into a present feeling. We cannot visit later. All we can do is hold a story about it, and that story is lived today, like everything else.

So the useful question is not how to get people to think further ahead. Hardly anyone does. It is which stories make tomorrow's problem feel like this evening's.

In the end nobody lives in the future. We live in today, inside whatever urgencies we, and the people around us, have agreed to feel.