Impulsive people die younger than non-impulsive people, so much so that how your teacher rated you as a student back when you were a kid is actually a decent predictor of your later mortality.
. The first two probable reasons for this are obvious:
1. They do risky things like drive too fast, hold up conbinis, or take drugs, all of which can actually kill you.
2. They engage in behaviors with potentially negative long-term consequences, like eating too many donuts or failing out of school and having to do a crappy job with bad safety precautions.
But the third reason is less obvious, unless you’re Jayman:
3. There is no point to planning for the future if you’re going to die young anyway.
Some people come from long-lived people. They have genes that will help keep them alive for a very long time. Some people don’t. These people live fast. They walk earlier, they mature earlier, they get pregnant earlier, and they die earlier. Everything they do is on a shorter timeframe than the long-lived people. To them, they aren’t impulsive–everyone else is just agonizingly slow.
Why save for retirement if you’re not going to live that long?
Impulsive people are like normal people, just sped up.
