l’Insomniaque

When researchers actually count the items that float along in the average’s person stream of consciousness, they find that about 12 percent of our daily thoughts are about the future. In other words, every eight hours of thinking includes an hour of thinking about things that have yet to happen. [...] When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing. [...] Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actuallly happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.