From throwing the bones and divining entrails to reading horoscopes and plotting weather maps, thinking about future plays a bigger role in our daily lives than most people realize. And as preoccupations go, it seems to be a healthy one. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that people who think more about tomorrow than others have a better chance of making it there. “At a very fundamental level future thinking plays an important role in survival. Human beings need to be able to foresee the future, at least have a hunch. Better prediction of danger is an evolutionary advantage,” says Dr. Wessel van Beek of the Symfora Group, a mental health institute in the Netherlands. So whether we’re plotting the direction of a spear or the Dow, at its core, thinking about the future is often closely linked to thinking about survival.