Why it’s so hard to think about your future (and how a deck of cards can fix that)

If I asked, “what matters most to you right now?” your mind would probably go strangely blank. It’s an enormous question, one you don’t think about every day. Easier to keep checking email, paying bills, and crossing off a to-do list than to stop and ask: what am I actually trying to build here?

It isn’t a “you” problem.  It’s how our brains are wired to work. And understanding why can help you get clearer about what you actually want.

A psychologist named Hal Hershfield ran a study that’s become a bit of a legend in behavioral science. He put people in an fMRI scanner and asked them to think about three things: themselves today, themselves ten years from now, and other people entirely.

The results were striking. When people thought about themselves right now, their brains showed a strong sense of connection. But when they pictured themselves a decade out? Their brain activity looked like they were thinking about a total stranger. 

In other words, “future you” looks like a stranger – someone you hardly know. 

And that has real consequences. The people whose brains showed the biggest gap between “me now” and “me later” were also the ones making the most impulsive money choices — grabbing the smaller reward today instead of waiting for the bigger one down the road. Which makes sense, right? Why would I make big sacrifices for a stranger?

Here’s the good news: this gap is fixable. In a follow-up study, when Hershfield’s team showed people digitally age-progressed photos of themselves — basically, a glimpse of their future face — their behaviors changed.  Those people chose to put noticeably more money toward retirement than people who didn’t see the photos. 

It wasn’t magic. It was just vividness. Once your future self is no longer a vague blur and you recognize the face as yours, you start planning the way you’d plan for someone you love.

Here’s the second piece of the puzzle: not only do we feel a disconnect when we think of the future, we really don’t like thinking much at all. 

Researchers Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert asked people to do something simple: sit alone in an empty room for somewhere between six and fifteen minutes, with literally nothing to do but think. They ran this experiment eleven different times, and the result held up again and again — most people did not enjoy it. At all.

In the study’s most famous twist, a good chunk of participants (way more men than women) chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than just sit with their own thoughts. 

What to make of that? The researchers’ takeaway wasn’t “we’re distracted by our phones.” It was something more basic: our minds are built to engage with the world around us. Left alone with no direction, most of us reach for literally anything else. Email. Doom scrolling. Anything but sitting and thinking.

Put these two things together – my future self is a stranger and I don’t like to just sit and think – and you can see why planning for the future is easy to avoid. 

That’s just how our brains work.

If you don’t choose your priorities, life will happily choose for you

Here’s the part that really matters.

If you never sit down and decide what matters most to you, life will decide for you – with whatever’s loudest that week. A deadline. A bunch of emails. A friend’s last-minute ask. If nothing is in line ahead of it, the defaults win. 

None of those things are bad, but they weren’t chosen. They showed up and you went along.

This is why a jam-packed, exhausting week can still leave you feeling like you didn’t really get anywhere. Busy isn’t the same as on-purpose. And it doesn’t always create a sense of accomplishment. 

The fix is to choose a few (very few) things ahead of time, so you can organize life around them instead of reacting to what comes up.

Make two or three vivid goals your north star

A giant list of priorities is just another excuse waiting to happen. Too overwhelming, too easy to avoid. Twenty goals is just a wish list. 

But two or three goals, chosen on purpose and pictured clearly enough to truly feel motivating – that’s completely different. Now you have a filter. A simple gut-check you can run any decision through: does this move me toward what I want, or away from it?

The trick is to make your goals vivid. A vague, fuzzy future doesn’t move you to act. But a specific picture — one you can picture and explain the “why” behind — is a powerful advantage. 

Here’s an example:

Instead of “buy a home in 3 years,” imagine this:

“In three years, I want to own a small house with a yard big enough for my dog and a flower garden, in a neighborhood where I can walk to a coffee shop on Saturday mornings. I want a place I can paint whatever color I want, and a mortgage payment that leaves room to breathe at the end of the month.”

A goal that makes you yearn for it makes it easier to say no to everyday demands and “buy now” temptations.

It becomes your north star. Not a rigid rulebook — but something meaningful enough to move you through the noise of life. 

Here’s a fun way to avoid the daunting feeling of Sitting and Thinking: Use a deck of cards I created, called Discovery Cards. These 14 cards describe the most common goals I hear from young women. Some of them may appeal to you, others will not. But they are guaranteed to spark ideas. 

Why do they work? Because they add a little structure – you’re not staring at a blank page – and get you thinking, “what if…” You can sort them, lay them out on a table, move them around, “see” your priorities in order. That’s difficult to do in your head. 

Don’t try to figure out your whole future – just two or three possibilities that matter right now.  

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How to get started

1. Print out the attachment (on card stock if you can), and cut the cards. 
2. Sort through the goals and make two piles: one for intriguing goals, the other for “not interested.” Write in your own goals.
3. Narrow it down to just two or three. In order of importance to you.
4. Sit with why each one matters to you and jot down specifics. Are there other people involved? Feelings or sensory details? A time frame? Most important, why does this matter to you? 

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Life will always hand you things to react to. If you’d rather take charge and steer your energy toward things that matter to you, spend 15 minutes with a deck of cards. Decide what you want to build. Create a future that’s vivid, concrete, and makes decisions easier.

Make friends with that stranger in your brain.