What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less.
"What makes us discount the future? Sangil “Arthur” Lee, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a new study with his colleagues, pins it at least partly on our powers of imagination. When we think about what hasn’t yet happened, it tends to be abstract. Things right now, on the other hand, we think of in more tangible terms. Several behavioral studies have supported the idea that what we cannot clearly imagine, we value less. We tend to have more intense emotional feelings about things we can imagine vividly. Being depressed doesn’t look like anything in particular, but a vision of a diabetic patient on dialysis can be disturbing. In fact, having depression is generally much worse than having diabetes. Yet people tend to say they’d prefer to get depression. Since future things are similarly thought of more abstractly, we feel less emotional about them and underestimate their value." - Jim Davies
Article: Why Your Brain Isn’t Into the Future