Future Focus: Importance of Long Term Goals

"If we are feeling fresh, it's easy to focus on our goals and exert self-control. But when we've already tested the limits of our self-control, it's harder to keep going," the authors explain. "This is when focusing on the big picture helps us to keep our eyes on the goal and push ourselves harder. In contrast, focusing on the immediate situation only emphasizes how we've already maximized the extent of our willpower and hinders self-control." _PO

Childhood is regarded as a time for play, when a focus on immediate gratification is expected. As children approach adolescence, when more adult emotions and gratifications come into focus, children need to learn self-restraint. Adolescents must act without the developed "executive function" of an adult brain. Mature adults are expected to be able to act responsibly and transcend most of the more destructive of the urges for immediate gratification. But increasingly, more and more "adults" lack the ability to postpone or deny themselves pleasures that can hurt them in the long-term.

Human brains incorporate the potential for a wide range of behaviours, involving all time scales of planning and all levels of self-restraint. It is the pre-frontal cortex that provides humans with the ability to envision many possible futures, and to carry out complex intertwined sequences of actions that can create the most desirable future.

Executive functions are the high-level cognitive processes that facilitate new ways of behaving, and optimise one's approach to unfamiliar circumstances.....But we particularly engage such processes when, for instance, we make a plan for the future, or voluntarily switch from one activity to another, or resist temptation; in other words, whenever we do many of the things that allow us to lead independent, purposeful lives. These processes are thought to be supported, at least in part, by structures within the frontal lobes of the brain. _ScienceDirect_via_DericBounds

Several conditions (besides childhood and adolescence) can interfere with a person's ability to utilise the "future focus" of his pre-frontal brain to avoid self-destructive behaviours. Damage to the brain's frontal lobe, surgical pre-frontal lobotomy, or just a drink or two of ethanol -- all of these are well known to interfere with normal executive function and self-control. But simple fatigue, discomfort, or lack of sleep can also interfere with future focus. In addition, lack of good role models in childhood, poor childhood upraising, and a childhood educational and social environment that emphasised immediate gratification over future goals, all lead to societies such as ours, where ever larger numbers of persons, over time, lack basic future orientation and self discipline.

The obesity epidemic is but one symptom of the society-wide deficiencies of functional executive processes. The increasing tendency of voters to choose candidates on the basis of security over freedom is another example of a society rife with adults whose frontal lobes never grew up.

The cure for the problem has to be administered at an early age -- between the ages of 4 and 7 -- to be considered effective. Much of a person's character comes with his genes, but the effect and expression of genes is strongly influenced by environment -- particularly early environment. If parents, teachers, and society in general miss that window of opportunity, too bad for the future.

Their future will tend to be full of obese adults who spend beyond their means, choose childlessness in order to have more time for personal pleasures, and vote for corrupt politicians who promise them ever more security, at the expense of vestigial freedoms and independence. Such a society is easily overrun by more primitive cultures with stronger future orientation.