"Thinking about the future is something we all do. Most of the time, our prospection is emotional. We think about things we desire and imagine having them. We think about things we fear, and imagine suffering them, evading them, vanquishing them. We run scenarios in our mind so that we can process present feelings by imagining we are feeling future ones.

"Some future thinking is systematic. It is the kind of trend analysis that can be projected forward. The stuff of the futurist. A good futurist is no more psychic than Sherlock Holmes, but just as hypervigilant of patterns and deft at weaving the finest threads of cause and effect.

"What interests me is a synthesis of the two. I suppose you could call this emotional futurism. Emotional Futurism is not simply about projecting emotions forward. It is about shapingthe future by thinking about how we will feel about its past. I think of this as proretrospection. As it turns out, thinking about the future’s past has a very real effect on the future."

Article: Think About the Future’s Past