Saving for a Stranger - Money & our Relationship to Time

At the end of each month, I try to take time to reflect on the month that went by, but also write that to-do list for the month to come. One of the particular kinds of promises I make to myself at the beginning of a month tends to go along the lines of “this month, I’ll be more intentional”. And, as such, I start listing all these things I’d like to accomplish, starting from “Make that transfer to my pension fund” or “Review my banking fees”. As days pass, some tasks suddenly feel so easy to postpone, just until tomorrow. At least that’s what I keep repeating to myself. Despite tackling other priorities, certain financial or admin decisions become strangely heavy, abstract, and quietly slip into the following month almost without me noticing.

The strange thing is that I am not confused about what would help. And I know many people can relate. Most of us understand, at least in theory, that small decisions repeated over time can change a life. We know that saving early matters and what compound interest is. We’re also conscious that avoiding a financial decision or admin altogether rarely makes it disappear.

When I think about it, many personal finance conversations begin with numbers: income, expenses, interest rates, asset allocation, returns. But before the numbers, there is a more intimate question: how do we relate to time? Because money is never only about money.¹

Part of our relationship to money - how we feel about it and, thus, how we manage it - comes down to “temporal discounting”, the tendency to value immediate rewards more highly than future ones, as introduced in previous blog posts. A concept that is closely linked is that of “future self-continuity”, the perceived connection between who we are now and our future self. Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that people who feel more connected to their future selves tend to discount future rewards less and save more.² In other words, saving may not only be the result of discipline, but also a matter of identity.

This blog post is about that subtle relationship: the one between the present self and the future self that is so easy to overlook. It’s an exploration of why the future often feels less valuable than the present, how stress and uncertainty shorten our mental horizon, and why better financial decisions may depend less on willpower than on learning to make the future feel real.

Time is Not Neutral: the Brain Reconstructs it

We often speak about time as if it were objective: an hour is an hour, a year is a year. Yet, basic laws of physics remind us that it is not quite the case, with time dilation rooted in Einstein’s work on relativity, with time being influenced by speed and gravity.

Truth being told, from a psychological perspective, time is not experienced as a clean, neutral line. It stretches and contracts. Think, for instance, about the state of flow.³ When absorbed in an activity that we enjoy and that challenges us without being overwhelming, time distortion regularly occurs and time can seem to speed up. In opposition, time can slow down when we are bored or in pain⁴, or even become blurry when we try to picture a distant future.

Recent research on time dilation, such as that led by Van Wassenhove et al. (2011), has shed light on its neural mechanisms. The authors found that certain events can be perceived as longer than others, despite the same duration. Such time dilation increased neural activation of the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and cortical midline structures, suggesting the illusion is influenced by self-referential processes. Similarly, Brietzke and Meyer (2021) showed that past and future self-representations were increasingly compressed as distance from the present increased, mobilising areas of the default network, including medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex.

In short, the brain does not experience time like a clock and, like any other outside stimuli or experiences, reconstructs it. As financial decisions greatly influence our future, it’s easy to understand why our monetary choices are inherently linked to our ability to imagine time and the future. The future requires us to simulate it and our brain to create a mental scene of a person we have not yet become and benefiting from choices we may not have made yet, often without immediate reward.

To put it simply, we could consider the action of saving as an act of faith that a future needs attention today. Similarly, we could say that the action of investing is accepting uncertainty in exchange for a potential future benefit, and we could view delaying immediate gratification as imagining a future state or possible reward competing with deprivation now.

What narrows the Horizon

Making future projections of such uncertain circumstances is a demanding cognitive task.⁵ Forecasting under uncertainty seems to rely on some of the same mental resources involved in cognitive control. In other words, when people try to anticipate what might happen, they also need to manage their attention, inhibit premature reactions, and choose how to respond.⁶ And uncertainty rarely arrives on its own: it tends to come with stress, which turns out to hit those same resources directly, not just strain them.

Maier, Makwana and Hare (2015) put people through a stress induction and then had them make food choices in an fMRI scanner. Under stress, the connection between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (i.e. the pathway involved in overriding an impulsive choice in favour of a considered one) weakened, while connectivity between the vmPFC and the amygdala and striatum, regions that flag immediate reward, went up. In plain terms: stress changes which parts of your brain are communicating to each other while you decide.

Scarcity does something related but distinct. Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao (2013) found that simply prompting people to think about a costly, uncertain expense measurably reduced cognitive performance among lower-income participants; and, separately, that the same farmers scored worse on cognitive tests before harvest, when cash was tight, than after. Interestingly , they checked whether felt stress explained the effect, and it didn't. The drop in cognitive bandwidth wasn't just "feeling stressed". Rather it looked more like the financial worry itself was occupying mental resources that would otherwise go toward planning, patience, or exactly the kind of future-oriented thinking this whole post is about.

In opposition to a future requiring imagination, the present has an enormous advantage: it can be felt. Through body signals (hunger, fatigue, etc.) or through emotions. This is, I believe, why the future often exists more clearly in numbers than in emotions or feelings: we may understand the logic of long-term investing, but the reward is abstract. Hence, “knowing better” so often fails to translate into “doing better”. Talking about discipline without taking into account the load we experience at a given moment falls short of a reality we all experience: the moments in which we most need to think about the future, such as a volatile market, a stressful quarter, a period of financial strain, are also the moments in which our capacity to do so is most compromised.

Designing for a Future That Feels Real

If the problem is partly a design problem i.e. a mismatch between how the brain represents the future and what financial planning demands of it, then some of the solution can also be a design problem. Not in the sense of clever tricks, but in the sense of deliberately building structures that compensate for a cognitive tendency, rather than fighting it with willpower alone.

A few strands of research point in a similar direction: not making people more disciplined per se but making the future either more vivid, more automatic, or harder to abandon.

Make the future self vivid: In an experiment using immersive renderings, Hershfield and colleagues (2011) showed participants images of themselves aged, then asked them to allocate a hypothetical paycheque between spending and retirement savings. Participants exposed to their aged self allocated meaningfully more to retirement than those who saw an unaltered image (i.e. image of their current selves) — a difference the researchers attributed to a flicker of recognised continuity between the person answering the question and the person in the image. You do not need virtual reality to borrow the principle. Write a short letter to yourself at 70. Imagine a specific ordinary Tuesday in that future, rather than a milestone. Look at an old photo of yourself as a child before making a decision that will only affect the adult you become: this exercise in imagination, projecting yourself into the future, seems to blur the line between "me" and "future me."

Automate the decision, don't repeat it: Thaler and Benartzi's "Save More Tomorrow" programs—in which employees commit to increasing their savings rate with each salary increase, instead of making a new decision every month—revealed significantly higher savings rates among participants compared to similar voluntary programs. This finding is generalisable: when a financial decision requires a new burst of imagination, it competes with immediate decisions and is often doomed to fail. Eliminating recurring decisions (automatic payroll transfers, automatic pension fund withdrawals, rounding up to the nearest euro) deprives participants of the opportunity for the present self to win.

Shrink the emotional distance, not just the time distance: Mental contrasting (briefly imagining the benefit of a future goal, then honestly naming the present-day obstacle to it) has shown some promise in translating intention into action, though the effect sizes in this literature vary and not all studies replicate cleanly.⁸ Simply asking, "what usually gets in the way when I mean to do this?" and writing down one sentence in answer may do more good than you’d think.

Use implementation intentions: Research associated with Peter Gollwitzer (1999) suggests that plans written as concrete "if–then" statements. For instance, “if it is the first of the month, then I transfer €200 to my pension fund before I open my current account”-like goals are more likely to be followed through than vague intentions such as "save more." The specificity appears key here.

For my own use, I like thinking of financial follow-through as a "bridge” framework that builds between two selves naturally in conflict with each other, instead of a character trait. The framework is constructed around: (i) vividness: does my future self feel real to me? (ii) automation: have I removed the need to make the same decision again? and (iii) pre-commitment: have I made it harder for my present self to reverse a decision my future self is counting on?

The Self across Time

Researchers studying intertemporal choice have long examined how people weigh immediate and delayed outcomes. The classic finding is that delayed rewards are discounted: their subjective value decreases as the delay increases. But more recent work touched upon at the start of this blog post adds a psychological layer to this: our willingness to wait may depend on how connected we feel to the beneficiary of that waiting, our future self.

Ersner-Hershfield’s work suggests that people do not simply see their future self as a later version of themselves. Instead, the future self can feel more or less psychologically close, almost like someone else when it feels distant. In a 2009 study using fMRI, Ersner-Hershfield, Wimmer and Knutson found that neural activity distinguishing "present self" from "future self" judgments predicted how steeply participants discounted future rewards a week later. A related study by the same group used a simpler measure: participants rated their present and future selves on a set of personality adjectives, and the more those two sets of ratings overlapped, the more financial assets they tended to have accumulated over their lifetime. This pattern held even after accounting for age and education.

And as with other people, we are usually more willing to sacrifice for those we feel close to than for those who feel like strangers.⁷

This adds a different emotional meaning to financial behaviour. Saving is, in concrete terms, transferring money from one account to another but is also about shifting attention to oneself from one moment to another. Rather than a simple exposure to the financial markets, investing becomes somewhat embodied, and a bet that a future version of oneself will be grateful for the patience one demonstrates today.

Thus, financial discipline is not simply a matter of self-control. It is a long-term relationship. This relationship can be fragile, but it can also be strengthened, deliberately and using methods that research is beginning to uncover. We can make the future more tangible. Therefore, before even questioning why people don't save, invest, or plan, perhaps we should ask ourselves a more personal question: how real does the future seem to us?

It is also worth pausing on how far this framework travels, and on what kind of evidence it actually rests on. Much of it is correlational: people who feel closer to their future self also tend to save more, but that does not, on its own, tell us that closeness causes saving rather than the reverse - that saving, or the security it produces, might itself make the future feel more inhabitable. Nor does it tell us the finding travels evenly across cultures.

Comparing Chinese and Euro-Canadian participants, Ji and colleagues (2019) found that Chinese participants perceived the past and future as more psychologically close to the present than Euro-Canadians did. This closeness was, in turn, associated with a stronger sense of self-continuity across time. This suggests the psychological distance between present and future selves is not a fixed cognitive fact but something culturally patterned. A larger study spanning 55 countries, led by Becker, Vignoles and colleagues (2018), reached a similar conclusion: people draw on different resources to feel continuous with their past and future selves depending on culture. However, and this usefully challenges the tendency towards oversimplification, these differences do not clearly correspond to the standard individualism-collectivism axis often used.

Between the causal ambiguity and the cultural variation, what the evidence supports is something more modest than a universal law.

Closing Thoughts

I always start each month with a to-do list, and I always write "make this transfer" on it. Some months, I do it on the third day. Other months, it's pushed to the next. For a while, I interpreted this as proof that I lacked discipline or wasn't taking my future seriously enough, giving me yet another reason to blame myself. I don't think that anymore. Shame is a strange tool when faced with a problem looming on the horizon: it makes the present moment more painful, which has the effect of narrowing our perspective instead of broadening it. So now, I simply try to acknowledge the postponement without adding any explanations and redo my list the following month.

Money, in the end, may be one of the more honest places to watch the self negotiate with itself across time. Long before it is a question of markets or returns, it is a question of who we believe we are becoming... and whether we're willing to act, today, on that belief.

Notes

¹ It is also about timing, waiting, imagining, delaying, trusting, and deciding what kind of future is worth making sacrifices for as illustrated and explained in the book “The Psychology of Money” written by Morgan Hessel.

² Ersner-Hershfield et al. (2009) found that individual differences in future self-continuity were associated with real-world saving behaviour. In another study, Ersner-Hershfield, Wimmer and Knutson (2008) used neuroimaging to show that neural measures of future self-continuity predicted temporal discounting.

³ First identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975), that state is associated with time distortion and loss of self-consciousness. Flow has been described as a phenomenon of altered consciousness.

⁴ See for instance Zakay (2014) on boredom and Rey et al. (2017) on experiences of pain.

⁵ Uncertainty makes forming well-informed judgments difficult and reduces our ability to make projections the future. A number of papers such as Terpini and D’Argembeau (2024) reveal that uncertainty complicates our abilities to make mental pictures of the future. Such uncertainty, when it is salient, makes future-oriented thoughts harder to access. As future representations - notably of scenarios or images that we had constructed beforehand - are less accessible, planning is also hindered.

⁶ See Pan et al. (2024).

⁷ See Molouk & Bartels (2019) for more on how future selves are treated compared to others in the context of monetary allocation.

⁸ See for instance Kizilcec and Cohen (2017), Wang et al. (2021) and Cross and Sheffield (2016) in contexts other than financial goals.

References

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