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Short-term thinking can lead to regrets or missed opportunities on an individual or systems level.

Mental time travel is a technique that benefits our decision-making processes through reverse thinking.

Future Design is an example of mental time travel that benefits organizations, industries, and governments.

This post was authored by Jayden Wan, a Stanford University student studying Civil Engineering. Jayden is passionate about the built environment and policy, and volunteers at Elders Action Network's Future Design Group and Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action.

It turns out that you don’t need a time-traveling DeLorean to explore the future. By taking a moment to pause, close your eyes, and engage your imagination, you can time-travel directly from your mind.

A growing movement throughout the world is embracing the practice of “mental time travel,” a remarkable cognitive skill that allows us to step outside the “now” and vividly inhabit both distant pasts and deep futures.

In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we’re often trapped in “short-termism.” This is a near-term perspective that prioritizes immediate results while neglecting long-term health. We see this in a tech industry that values quarterly profits over human well-being, the depletion of our natural resources, and political systems that swing wildly every election cycle, losing vital momentum. While "thinking in the moment" was once a survival skill that kept our ancestors alive, the modern world allows us much more than just survival—and we have the ability to pursue goals like long-term satisfaction, stability, and sustainability.

By traveling through our past, present, and future, we can identify our current trajectory and adjust as we see fit.

Mental Time Travel in Our Personal Lives

As individuals, our day-to-day lives—the chores, the emails, the endless pings of digital connection—can keep our thoughts entirely preoccupied. We can feel like we’re “treading water” rather than swimming in a clear direction.

Mental time travel acts as a form of cognitive exercise, helping us see past the fog of the daily grind so we can intentionally determine our trajectory. It’s the difference between aimlessly wandering into the future and reverse-engineering the life we actually want.

One of the most effective ways to apply this is by bridging the psychological gap between who we are now and who we will become. By time-traveling to the future and visiting our “future selves,” we can understand the consequences of our current choices and adjust them based on both past experience and future aspirations. Neurobiologically, we often treat our future selves as total strangers, which makes it difficult to prioritize long-term health over immediate gratification. However, by engaging in a mental dialogue—for example, asking our future selves what they are proud of or what they regret—we bridge this distance.

When we make our future self a friend rather than a stranger, our goals start feeling like acts of long-term self-care.

Mental Time Travel in Organizations, Industries, and Communities

While healing our own relationship with time is a powerful first step, we don’t live in a vacuum. Most of the heavy lifting required to shape a better future requires more than a single person’s imagination. Real, systemic change happens when we scale this "Anti-Doomer" toolkit from the individual “I” to the collective “We.”

How do we move beyond the solo practitioner to establishing long-term thinking within a family, workplace, or community?

It requires moving from private visualization to shared world-building. While mental time travel can ground individuals, it is also being used as a transformative decision-making tool for organizations, industries, and governments. This movement to embed future thinking in institutions is known as Future Design, pioneered by Japanese economist Tatsuyoshi Saijo. This approach goes beyond simple forecasting; it involves "embodying" the future to create better policy and strategy today.

Future Design relies on a structured framework for mental time travel that integrates three distinct lenses:

Past Design: This involves looking back at systemic choices and the achievements of those who came before. By understanding the foundations of current systems, we recognize the long-term patterns that have led to the present.

Present Design: This addresses immediate needs and the "short-termism" that often acts as a barrier to progress. It acknowledges current pressures (like quarterly targets or immediate family needs) without allowing them to hijack the entire strategy.

Future Design: This is the most radical shift. Participants physically and mentally shift their mindset to represent a constituency decades away. In practice, this often involves "world-building" exercises, such as simulations of the world in the year 2050, where leaders might even wear futuristic attire to physically facilitate a mental vacation from the present.

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By adopting the perspective of a future generation, leaders can look back at the present to identify which choices truly matter. This mental time travel acts as a “psychological handbrake,” allowing institutions to prioritize long-term health and community wellbeing over immediate but fleeting gains.

Not Just Thinking, but Making a Better Future

I first heard of mental time travel from a relative, who encouraged me to visualize myself in my 40s, including the possible, preferred, and probable futures. As an 18-year-old college student, I find that the exercise of mental time travel greatly influences the decisions I make today, and it helps me feel a sense of control over what otherwise would be an overwhelmingly unpredictable life.

As someone also passionate about civic engagement and the environment, I found the idea of Future Design—leveraging mental time travel for organizations, industries, and governments—inspiring. I found that these entities are simply manifestations of the people behind them, and that if we can change their minds, then we’d enhance the foresight of the communities, policies, and businesses around us. In October 2024, I worked with a team to host a Future Design Retreat in Cupertino, California, that included 50 participants of diverse ages and backgrounds. The event centered on environmental issues in the local community and simulated a policymaking process that regarded future ancestors. This Future Design Retreat introduced Future Design to the United States, taking inspiration from its success in other places worldwide.

What I know now is that embodying the future is part of a self-fulfilling journey that exposes us to uplifting and cautionary possibilities, and leaves us to decide what kind of world we’d like to contribute to.

Ultimately, when we design today from the perspective of the future, we ensure that the legacy we leave behind is one that future generations, including the young people of today, will actually want to inherit. For ourselves and the world around us, we no longer have to be bystanders to time, but can actively participate in how to engage with it.

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