[eikenberry]

None of those are future in a planning sense. They are immediate goals with immediate impacts. Getting exercise regularly pays off almost immediately and continues to pay of day to day. Finishing a project today has the immediate reward of finishing it and not having to worry about it anymore. The example was your 10 year from now self. And while you might come up with some 10-year span anecdotes, I don't see it being a good heuristic for living your life in general.

[rowanG077]

They are definitely future planning things. IF you don't go for a run now you won't notice tomorrow, you won't notice in a week. You won't even notice in a month. But compare a person who is 50 who was active for his entire life and one who isn't and the differences can be stark.

[eikenberry]

I've been thinking about this and IMO really it is more about the focus on regret as a motivator for action. Regret is a negative emotion, so this is basically a strategy of pain avoidance. I think it is this aspect that is the problem, not the future forecasting. That you are optimizing for pain avoidance and not your happiness.

[wruza]

Can’t we say that an inactive person just lived through their life quicker because they didn’t spend time on these activities? Absolute years of life isn’t a meaningful metric here, imo.