“Why, Parfit wonders, are we so biased toward the future? Was this tendency produced by natural selection? We are upset when we are told that in the future we shall have to endure a day of great pain, but many people do not care at all if they are told that they endured pain in the past that has been forgotten; and yet the past pain is just as real. We don’t have the same bias with other people: if we learn that a loved person suffered greatly before he died, we are upset by this, even though it’s over. The past is just as real as the present. If someone we loved is dead, that person isn’t real now. But that’s just like the fact that people who are far away aren’t real here.”

— Larissa MacFarquhar, How to be Good (The New Yorker, September 5, 2011)