“But this new efficiency has had serious downsides—not least in the mismatch between the self-gratifying power available to consumers and consumers’ ability to manage it all. Humans, it’s safe to say, were not designed for a world of such easy gratification. Decades of research suggest that our brains, adapted for a prehistoric world of scarce resources and infrequent opportunities, are wired to prioritize immediate rewards and costs and to disregard rewards and costs that occur in the future. This natural bias against the future, so essential for our ancestors, is an Achilles’ heel in a modern economy built around immediate pleasure and deferred pain. Nearly every consumer proposition today, from credit to fast food and entertainment to social media and online shopping, capitalizes on our anti-future bias: in all cases, we’re provided immediate pleasure, while any costs, whether financial, physical, or emotional, are deferred so seamlessly that they vanish from our perception.”