“…Swapping pictures for words can have just as strong an effect (Bryan & Hershfield, 2012;Chishima & Wilson, 2020) because both enhance emotional connections over time (Bartels & Rips, 2010;Ersner-Hershfield, Garton, Ballard, Samanez-Larkin, & Knutson, 2009). Uncertainty makes the future self feel not just socially remote but also as belonging to a future age (see Maglio & Kwok, 2016), as these different constructs conspire to push things farther and farther away (Maglio, 2020a(Maglio, , 2020bMaglio, Trope, & Liberman, 2013a). Although the intertemporal tradeoffs that impact cumulative future selves transpire over objective time (e.g., $20 today vs. $40 next week), people mentally convert from absolute time to a relative sense of closeness or distance in thinking across time (Hu & Maglio, 2018), including the making of choices between smaller payoffs sooner and larger payoffs later (Maglio, Trope, & Liberman, 2013b;Malkoc & Zauberman, 2019;Xu, González-Vallejo, & Vincent, 2020;Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettman, 2009).…”