The Event Horizon
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There is another devastating way that time-blindness manifests. I realized I'd missed on including it after my article on The Time Thief was already published. It woke me in the middle of the night because, of all its forms, this is the one that's affected me most.
I don't struggle with tardiness, if anything I tend to be early for important events and regular appointments. I'm pretty good at keeping an updated planner and schedule, and I have strategies in place that generally work well enough to keep me from any significant consequence of losing time in the now.
But.
I've never been good at very long-term planning. When someone asks me where I see myself in five years I draw a blank. A year, maybe a little more, is about as far as my time horizon extends. After that, Future Me fades into the static of all the things in the world around me that I can't control, while simultaneously splitting into a multiverse of paths they might force me to take.
When I was younger, this inability to see and relate to my future self, when all of my peers could easily rattle off degrees, careers, travel, spouses, homes, and even number of children had me secretly convinced that I was going to die an early death. As if the murky darkness of my future meant it didn't exist.
While having no horses in the race made playing the Game of Life boardgame more fun, because the lack of concrete goals made it easier to roll with the punches, it didn't exactly help me prepare for a real adulthood, career, marriage, retirement... Life.
Despite there being no shortage of socioeconomic factors at play in my early days, the cold fact is that the reason I personally couldn't see into my future with enough clarity to make it happen is due to time-blindness. I just didn't know it.
This struggle with long-term planning followed me into adulthood, where a relatively varied career involving mostly "unskilled" positions, and living in a state of constant burnout, absorbed the capacity I might have had to realize that I needed to teach myself how. I needed to figure out how to synthesize the urgency to make these plans and then make them happen, but I didn't —or I couldn't? Maybe a bit of both.
The most painful result of this is that I've had a few employer-based retirement plans, but none of them amounted to much, and the years have continued to roll by in five-year chunks. With Future Me continually skipping forward, staying just beyond the horizon.
The Event Horizon
In physics, an event horizon is a point of no return around a black hole, a boundary beyond which information cannot escape back to us.
It feels like the perfect metaphor to describe the way I observe my own timeline. As I mentioned in talking about the Time Thief, time blindness is a known neurological phenomenon that exists due to documented differences in how some brains process and perceive the passage of time.
This is compounded by a concept called Temporal Discounting —the clinical term for how the brain values immediate rewards over future ones. In the ADHD brain, this is often dialed up to an extreme. The "reward" of a stable retirement in 30 years feels abstract and unreal compared to the immediate rewards of actions we can take today, right now.
Future-Mindedness, as described by Dr. Russell Barkley, is considered to be a core deficit in ADHD, resulting in what he refers to as "Temporal Myopia". The brain struggles to project itself into the future to create a detailed vision of its future life, like a mental movie, making it more difficult to use such a vision to guide present day actions.
This doesn't mean there's nothing we can do. Knowing that the Event Horizon exists is half the battle, so if you've made it this far you're already better off.
Manifesting a Future Beyond the Horizon
If the struggles I've described sound familiar to you and you'd like to develop a better relationship with time, I'm happy to say I've brought some very special alchemical shifts to share. These strategies are helping me see beyond the horizon so I can build a better life for Future Me.
Fill a Hope Chest
Remember The Heirloom counterspell from our encounter with The Time Thief? That was where we talked about considering each action as creating an heirloom for your Future Self, whether tarnished or pristine. This is where we give those Heirlooms a home.
Get a notebook or create a digital folder —a hope chest— and save them. Record them. Write them down. Take pictures of them. Keep finished checklists, annotations, and receipts. Write letters to Future You detailing the ways you're building their life and how excited you are to meet them.
Regular visits to this collection of heirlooms can help you feel a more concrete connection to this Future Self, and the more clearly you can see them, the easier it will be to care for them with intention.
Automate the Boring Stuff
Since the deep future feels unreal, finding ways to make it tangible in the now is a worthy challenge. Consider provisions you want to make for future you, and brainstorm ways to translate them into actions you can take at regular intervals now —then offload the work (if you can), so that Future You doesn't have to rely on the motivational fluctuations of Present You.
For example, rather than having an abstract or conceptual goal like "save for retirement" that feels unwieldy to even think about, set up an automatic transfer of $10 into an account named 'Future Me's Coffee Fund' every Friday.
This one-and-done action is small, immediate, and connected to a concrete idea.
I realize that saving for retirement can be much more nuanced than this, with all the different types of accounts and the ways you can use them, but the point is to start. Once you've proven to yourself that you can take simple actions in favor of your future self, you're much more likely to keep going, maybe even trusting yourself to take bigger steps.
Don't Set Goals, Plan with Values
The question "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" is often paralyzing, and can even conjure feelings of inadequacy, shame, or bewilderment. A better question is "What do you want your life to feel like in 5 years?" Do you want to feel calm? Creative? Secure? Stable? Adventurous? Wise?
By identifying core values instead of concrete outcomes like job titles or house sizes, you can ask a simpler question: "What is one small thing I can do today that aligns with that value?"
Build a Lighthouse
If the entire path is shrouded in fog, you don't need a detailed map. Just a single, distant light to aim for. Locate one or two major, non-negotiable "lighthouses" for your deep future: like I want to be debt-free, or I want to be living near nature. You don't need to know exactly how you'll get there. Your only job is to periodically check: Is the small step I'm taking today moving me toward, or away from, that light?
Go Back to the Future
This might be the most important one, none of these strategies will be quite as impactful if you skip it.
Commit to a recurring ritual —monthly, quarterly, whatever feels right— where you intentionally step back and evaluate the future you're building. Make this appointment with yourself sacred. In order to keep from losing sight of your lighthouse, you must regularly check to make sure you're heading in the right direction.
Especially when you're going through a period of uncertainty, or when you are standing at what seems like an impasse and trying to find a way forward.
Seeing beyond the Event Horizon isn't about perfectly predicting the future; it's about making a promise to the person you are becoming. It's a slow, intentional process of building lighthouses, tending to heirlooms, and trusting that the small steps you take today are creating a future worth waiting for.
✂️ TL;DR
The Problem: The Event Horizon: This is a devastating aspect of time blindness that affects long-term planning. It's the inability to see or connect with your "Future Self," making the distant future feel like a foggy, inaccessible void. This isn't a lack of ambition; it's a neurological phenomenon.
The Science: This experience is rooted in concepts like Temporal Discounting (the ADHD brain's extreme preference for immediate rewards over abstract future ones) and deficits in Future-Mindedness (a struggle to mentally create a detailed "movie" of your future).
The Strategy: Navigate with Values, Not a Map. Since a detailed map is impossible, the solutions are about building a compass. Strategies like The Lighthouse and Planning with Values help you navigate by a general direction. Tools like The Heirloom and Automate the Boring Stuff make the future feel more concrete and cared-for in the present.