I found this text, very well explain the difference between to care at the present( Satisfaction) and to care that you can feel fir 1000 years:
ESSAY: Thinking ahead

Many of the most serious problems we face are the result of our tendency to focus on the present, says Richard Fisher.

ONE of our most crucial skills is mental time travel: the ability to transport the mind to the past or future. We are lucky to have this talent. It means we can remember our best experiences and make detailed plans for tomorrow. It may even have supercharged humanity’s evolutionary success. Yet it is an imperfect skill. We can still get stuck in the present, distracted by the near-term.

In my book The Long View, I argue that societies are in danger of becoming “time-blinkered”, which is worse than simple short-termism: it is a present-focused view so embedded that it goes unnoticed. The good news is that we can escape this trap – if only we understand the factors that shape how we think about time.

In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have converged on the idea that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences underpins some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, antibiotic resistance, income inequality, the risk of nuclear war and more. The historian François Hartog argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now”.

It is well established that people have a bias towards the present, focusing on salient attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves, community or descendants. In business and finance, this bias surfaces as short-sighted corporate decisions. In politics, it is the way governments ignore the lessons of history and the future consequences of their policies. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it manifests as the unwillingness to make small sacrifices today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, winning the election or sating some other near-term desire.

These time-blinkered perspectives can’t be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. I call these “temporal habits”.

People’s reluctance to delay gratification is the most obvious example, but there are others. One is the “availability heuristic”, which describes how the most accessible information in the present skews decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming”. Another is “salience bias”, where loud and urgent distractions seem disproportionately important, nudging people to ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when the tweets of Elon Musk draw far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.

The human mind is bad at noting slow change. As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once quipped, if invading aliens wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships, they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to creeping environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective amnesia called “shifting baseline syndrome”. It is so named because each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with bug-splattered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect abundance has plummeted.

A final, subtle temporal habit involves the words we use to describe the past or future. In English and other languages, we talk about the longer-term future as being “far” or “distant”, as if it were a foreign land. The psychologists Nira Liberman, now at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and Yaacov Trope at New York University say that this has a psychological distancing effect, meaning people become less concerned about the details of what happens there.

In their original 2008 paper on the phenomenon, the pair used Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Breugel the Elder’s 16th-century painting, to highlight this discrepancy. In the foreground, a farmer ploughs on, ignoring the death of Icarus in the background, his legs flailing in the ocean. The physical distance makes his plight less tangible. Map this onto people’s attitudes to climate change, and it is easier to see how future consequences get ignored. If it is “far”, as in over the horizon, then it is less salient. The future, however, isn’t distant at all: our grandchildren may well live in the same city or country as we do, and will certainly inherit the same planet.

None of these temporal habits would be impossible to mitigate if brought into the open. However, they have also been amplified by a host of subtle incentives and deterrents that collectively discourage the long view. I call these “temporal stresses”.

Let’s consider one example, from the business world. In the early 20th century, the New York Stock Exchange made a seemingly reasonable request of listed companies: every three months, they would share updates with the market. By 1931, 63 per cent of firms had complied. This was quarterly reporting, a temporal invention that has discouraged a long view among corporate leaders ever since. Studies suggest quarterly reporting correlates with reductions in R&D spending, patents and hiring – all things that can bring longer-term prosperity, albeit at short-term cost. “I’m confident: when firms are forced to increase reporting frequency, they cut back on investments,” says Arthur Kraft at City, University of London. He blames two things: “discipline” and “myopia”. Discipline is where leaders are punished by the financial market for taking a long-term view. Myopia is self-inflicted: pre-emptively taking short-term decisions to please investors.

It isn’t hard to find more case studies where people in business took ill-advised shortcuts to satisfy targets. Historian Jerry Muller, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, calls this “metric fixation”. To illustrate that the problem goes far beyond business, he points out that when New York introduced scorecards for cardiologists, which publicised their surgery mortality rate, many doctors stopped operating on sicker, riskier patients.

Bad incentives also drive short-termism in politics. In my book, I tell the story of David Stockman, a member of US president Ronald Reagan’s administration who got himself into hot water in the 1980s over his unwillingness to support a social security reform that would have played out over many years. Instead, he favoured short-term cuts, and he was transparent about his reasons. “I’m just not going to spend a lot of political capital on some other guy’s problem in 2010,” he told reporters.

The truth is there are few upsides for politicians to make costly sacrifices that benefit future administrations. And in an age of social media and 24-hour news, populism thrives. As former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker once said about political decisions: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”