Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb

Have you ever taken a road trip to a new place and felt like the drive there dragged on forever — only to be surprised at how quickly the return trip seemed to fly by?

That feeling has a name. Behavioral scientists call it the “going home effect.” It’s the phenomenon where the return leg of a journey feels shorter, even though it takes just as long. The reason, researchers say, is rooted in familiarity: when we’ve already seen the route, the uncertainty fades, and time seems to compress.

Now apply that same logic to your financial future — especially retirement.

Uncertainty is distancing

Recent research from the University of Indiana shows that uncertainty doesn’t just slow down how we perceive time, it creates psychological distance. People tend to see the future as farther away when it’s unfamiliar, vague or emotionally disconnected from their present-day lives. In other words, if retirement feels unclear, it also feels unreachable.

This “mental distance” may help explain why so many people put off saving for the future. But here’s the rub: the reverse is also true. When people take time to visualize their future selves, they are significantly more likely to start saving for that future. Seeing yourself in the next chapter of life makes it real — and when something is real, it’s worth planning for.

So how do we shrink the distance between now and then?

Flip your thinking. Instead of starting in the present and trying to stretch your mind toward the future, start in the future and rewind back. Picture where you want to be and then ask what it would take to get there.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Indiana researchers conducted a series of experiments where participants were prompted to imagine a future year (say, 2034) and visualize what their life looked like. Only afterward were they asked to think about what financial decisions in the present would support that vision. This reversal in mental framing — starting with the future, then rewinding back — had a noticeable effect. Participants were 14% more likely to invest in a long-term savings product when asked to plan this way.

A sample prompt quoted in the study precisely illustrates the concept: “The year is 2034 … rewind back to 2024 and consider saving for the 2034 you.”

Most of us are used to doing the opposite. We look around at our current expenses, salaries or anxieties, and then try to stretch that frame of reference into something that resembles a retirement plan. The problem is, present-day constraints rarely inspire future-oriented action. The better way is to make the future vivid — and then translate it back into the steps we can take today.

So what does that look like in practice?

Visualize your future self, then work backwards

Begin by picturing a day in your retired life. Not in abstract terms, but in sensory, specific detail. Imagine it’s a morning in the year 2035 or 2045. Where are you waking up? What kind of home are you in? What’s your morning routine? Are you traveling? Volunteering? Spending time with grandkids? Having coffee with old friends?

Then take 15 minutes to write a letter from your future self to your present self. What are you grateful you did when you were younger? What financial habits paid off? What regrets did you avoid? This simple exercise creates an emotional and cognitive bridge between today and tomorrow. It helps bring your future self out of the shadows and into focus.

From there, you can rewind. Ask yourself: “What would have to happen between now and then to make this day real?” Break it down. What kind of income would you need to support this lifestyle? How much would you need to have saved? What kind of monthly contributions would get you there?

By starting with a destination and then planning the route, you replicate the clarity of that return trip — the “going home” effect — but in reverse. The future becomes a place you know. That makes it easier to believe in, and easier to act on.

To stay grounded, create visual cues for yourself — a vision board. This might be a sticky note on your mirror with a retirement mantra, photos of the people with whom you want to share your lifetime, or even a few short phrases that describe your vision for later life. These reminders keep your long-term self front and center in your everyday life.

It can also help to make this a recurring habit. Try setting a weekly or monthly “Future Friday” check-in, a brief moment each week where you reflect on your goals and progress or re-read your future-self letter. Ask yourself again: “The year is 2035 … what does the 2025 version of me need to do today to stay on track?”

Reversals are not always bad

What behavioral science reveals is that we’re not bad at saving because we don’t care. We’re bad at saving because we rarely feel the future. But by reversing the order of thought — starting with a vivid picture of life ahead and rewinding back to the present — we collapse the mental distance that holds us back.

The truth is, you’re already on your way to your future. You can drift there or design it. And the person you become in 2035 or 2045 isn’t a stranger — it’s you. Your future you is just waiting to see what decisions you’ll make next to meet you there.

So start with that image. Then rewind. That’s where your smartest moves begin.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb are financial advisers at Wealth Enhancement Group and co-hosts of “Your Money” on WCCO 830 AM on Sunday mornings. Email Bruce and Peg at yourmoney@wealthenhancement.com. Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Wealth Enhancement Group and Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services are separate entities from LPL Financial.

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” (or, “Jane Austen a gâché ma vie”) is a catchy, provocative title for writer/director Laura Piani’s debut feature, but it is a bit of a misnomer. Her heroine, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) might harbor that fear deep inside, but it’s never one that she speaks aloud. A lonely bookseller working at the famed Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, she gets lost in the love notes left on the shop mirror, and complains to her best friend and coworker Felix (Pablo Pauly) that she was born in the wrong century, unwilling to engage in casual “digital” connection. Deeply feeling and highly imaginative, perhaps she believes she’s alone because she won’t settle for anything less than a Darcy.

Good thing then that Felix, posing as her “agent,” sends off a few chapters of her fantasy-induced writing to the Jane Austen Residency. And who should pick up Agathe from the ferry but a handsome, prickly Englishman, Oliver (Charlie Anson), the great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Ms. Austen herself. She can’t stand him. It’s perfect.

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is the kind of warm romance that will make any bookish dreamer swoon, as this thoroughly modern woman with old-fashioned ideas about love experiences her own Austen-esque tumble through her own emotions. While she initially identifies with the wilting old maid Anne from “Persuasion,” her shyly budding connection with Oliver and questions about her blurred-lines friendship with Felix is more Elizabeth Bennett in “Pride and Prejudice.” A pastoral English estate is the ideal setting for such a dilemma.

The casting and performances are excellent for this contemporary, meta update to Austen — Rutherford is elegant but often awkward and fumbling as Agathe; Anson conveys Oliver’s passionate yearning behind his reserved, wounded exterior with just enough Hugh Grant-ian befuddlement. Pauly plays the impulsive charlatan with an irrepressible charm.

But it isn’t just the men that have Agathe in a tizzy. The film is as romantic about books, literature, writing and poetry as it is about such mundane issues as matters of the flesh. A lover of books and literature, Agathe strives to be a writer but believes she isn’t one because of her pesky writer’s block. It’s actually a dam against the flow of feelings — past traumas and heartbreaks — that she attempts to keep at bay. It’s through writing that Agathe is able to crack her heart open, to share herself and to welcome in new opportunities.

“Writing is like ivy,” Oliver tells Agathe, “it needs ruins to exist.” It’s an assurance that her broken past hasn’t broken her, but has given her the necessary structure to let the words grow. The way the characters talk about what literature means to them, and what it means to write, will seduce the writerly among the viewers, these discussions of writing even more enchanting than any declarations of love or ardent admiration.

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If you’ve read any Austen (or watched any of the films made from Austen’s novels), Piani’s film will be pleasantly predictable in its outcomes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an enjoyable journey — it’s our expectations, both met and upended, that give the film its appealing cadence. It never lingers too long, just sweet enough in its displays to avoid any saccharine aftertaste or eye-rolling sentiment.

With its lovely verdant environs and gentle rhythms, there’s a salve-like quality to “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” a balm for any battered writer or romantic’s soul. It may be utter fantasy, but it’s the kind of escape you’ll want to revisit again and again, like a favorite Austen novel. And as it turns out, our heroine was wrong. Jane Austen didn’t wreck her life, rather, she opened it up to the possibilities that were right in front of her.

‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’

(In French and English with English subtitles)

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language, some sexual content and nudity)

Running time: 1:38

How to watch: In theaters May 23

A few winter constellations, most notably Gemini the Twins and Auriga the Charioteer, are still hanging out in the western evening sky, but for the most part, the spring constellations have taken over. They’re not as flashy as those of winter. There are still many celestial treasures to find, but you just need to visually dig for them a little deeper. That actually can be a lot of fun, especially if you can stargaze in the darker countryside skies.

Last week, I featured the large but faint constellation Virgo the Virgin, now visible in the low southern evening sky.  This week, I want to take you to Coma Berenices, a small and faint spring constellation. Its name is Latin for “Berenice’s Lock”, representing the beautiful hair of Queen Berenice of Egypt. Coma Berenices has a distinction that no other constellation has. The best-known tale about how the hair wound up in the heavens comes from the Greeks and is based on a true story but still possesses quite a bit of malarkey. I’ll get to that in a bit.

The three brightest stars of Coma Berenices form a wide arrow pointing at the much brighter and bigger constellation Bootes the Herdsman. Coma Berenice’s hair, though, is made up of roughly a Y-shaped cluster of about a dozen stars just off the western side of the arrow.

(Mike Lynch)

I think the best way to find it is to face south as darkness sets in and look for the brightest and highest star you can see. That’s Arcturus, a star that has a definite orange-reddish glow to it. Just hold your fist at arm’s length, and about two and a half of your fist-widths to the right of Arcturus is where to start looking for the heavenly hair. You may need binoculars to help find it, especially if you have to put up with any light pollution. In dark rural skies it should be a piece of cake to spot. The star cluster that makes up Queen Berenice’s hair is made up of very young stars, about 500 million years old. The stars that make up the locks are about 250 light-years away, just down the celestial block from us. Oh, by the way, just one light-year equals nearly 6 trillion miles.

Now, back to the story concerning the heavenly hair. Berenice was the queen of Egypt around 200 B.C. and was madly in love with her husband, the famous Pharaoh Ptolemy III. Back in those days, there were many fierce battles but an upcoming battle against the Assyrians was expected to be especially bloody. Queen Berenice was scared to death that her king might meet his death.  So, she made a deal. She promised the gods that she’d cut off all of her beautiful golden hair and offer it as a sacrifice if Ptolemy returned safely.

Her prayers were answered when Ptolemy returned just a week after he left. It was a tremendous military victory! True to her word, Berenice sheared off all of her hair and dedicated it to the temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. However, within a week, the temple was broken into and thieves made off with the hair. The temple priests were in charge of security and in big, big trouble! They came up with a plan to save their necks.

The night after the robbery the temple priests requested that Berenice and Ptolemy join them outside to show them something amazing! They pointed high in the sky and showed the royal couple a small but faint cluster of stars and claimed that Aphrodite shot Berenice’s sacrificed hair high into the heavens for everyone worldwide to enjoy. Fortunately for the temple priests, Berenice and Ptolemy swallowed this bull hook, line and sinker. Every spring, we can also enjoy the heavenly hair in the constellation Coma Berenices, but we know the truth.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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If you have been to an ER lately — or if you’ve watched the disturbingly accurate TV show “The Pitt” — you’ve seen scenes that resemble field hospitals more than state-of-the-art medical centers. Waiting rooms have been turned into makeshift care zones. Chairs, cots and cubicles serve as gurneys. Providers eyeball the sick and injured and “shotgun” orders for patients. It feels chaotic and unwelcoming because it is.

This is the new normal for emergency departments in the United States, the result of a dramatic rise in the number of ER beds occupied by patients waiting for a space on a traditional hospital ward. We call them “boarders” and in many emergency departments, they routinely account for half or more of all available care space.

With a fraction of beds in play for new arrivals, waiting room patients — even some arriving by ambulance — are increasingly likely to be seen, examined and treated in the lobby. The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating: worse patient outcomes, fragmented care, longer hospital stays, ballooning costs and rising frustration and anger among staff and patients.

Less visible — but no less harmful — is the toll this takes on young doctors in training.

A recent study led by Dr. Katja Goldflam, a Yale professor, documents the scale of the problem. Nearly three-quarters of the emergency medicine residents she surveyed reported that boarding had highly negative effects on their training. They expressed anxiety and a mounting emotional toll over their diminishing ability to manage patients or handle department surges with confidence, and their growing sense that they could not provide the kind of care they’d expect for their own families.

As emergency medicine educators with a combined six decades of experience, this feels personal to us. We are failing our trainees. We are failing our patients. And we are compromising the future of doctors and patients alike.

The damage is not theoretical. One of us recently experienced it personally, when his father — during the final months of his life — visited two prestigious ERs. Both times, recently trained physicians missed straightforward but life-threatening problems after brief, stopgap-style encounters. Poor clinical judgment is more likely, and more consequential, in a hurried and overwhelmed care environment.

Today, medical education is no longer centered on memorizing facts. With smartphones, decision-support tools and now AI, information is everywhere. What sets a good doctor apart is judgment — the ability to navigate uncertainty, synthesize complex data and make decisive, accurate choices. Building this kind of judgment requires many patient encounters — “reps.”

No amount of classroom learning, reading or podcast listening can replace the formative experience of confronting a clinical puzzle in a patient who has entrusted you with their care. Yet in today’s crowded ERs, physicians in training are losing access to these crucial face-to-face encounters and the skills, competence and confidence they teach.

Shift change “rounds” — once a space for discussion and reflection — now operate more like inventory checks: Here’s a 78-year-old with heart failure, there’s a 35-year-old with appendicitis still awaiting an OR.

Meanwhile, as the waiting room overflows, doctors scatter into the lobby to see new arrivals, hoping to reduce the backlog. “Lobby medicine” — a sanitized term for care delivered in a setting stripped of privacy, dignity and safety — is more than a logistical nightmare. It sends a terrible message to young physicians: that cursory patient assessments, firing off broad-spectrum tests and “moving the meat” is acceptable. It is not.

Why is boarding getting worse?

COVID-19 was the inflection point. While volumes dipped early in the pandemic, they rebounded within a year — and in 2024, according to national hospital metrics, stood at 10% above 2021 levels. In 2023, research showed a 60% increase in boarding and fourfold increase in median boarding times compared with pre-pandemic ERs.

The reasons are complex and systemic: financial pressure to keep hospital beds full (every open space is lost revenue), an aging population with greater needs, dwindling access to primary care and a collapsing system of rehab, skilled nursing or home health options. Hospitals are boxed in, forced to provide basic care while waiting days, sometimes weeks, for aftercare services to become available. It is not uncommon for a third or more of the patients in a hospital to be on hold pending an appropriate discharge destination. The bottleneck trickles down: Wards become holding areas, the ER becomes a de facto ward and the lobby becomes the ER.

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So, what’s the fix?

The simple answer — just end boarding — has been the rallying cry of well-intentioned efforts for decades. Nearly all have failed. Why? Because emergency department crowding is not the root problem. It’s the canary in the coal mine of a dysfunctional health care delivery system riddled with misaligned incentives and priorities.

Real change will require collective outrage that spills beyond the ERs, into the inboxes and onto the agendas of hospital administrators, insurance executives and elected officials.

If we want better health care it means investing more — adding beds, staffing and aftercare capacity. It means creating primary care options other than a default trip to the ER. It means reclaiming the ER not just as a place for healing, but as a place for learning. A place where doctors are taught not in disaster zones, but in environments that allow for connection and understanding of our patients and their diseases. Finally, it means recognizing that designing and investing in better systems and in medical education is crucial to public safety.

Training a great doctor is like training a great athlete. You can’t learn to sink a three-pointer by watching YouTube. You have to step onto the court. In medicine, that means standing in front of a patient and deciding: What now?

That experience — raw, real and imperfect — is irreplaceable. And we’re losing it.

How we care for patients today will define how we all will be cared for tomorrow.

Eric Snoey is an attending emergency medicine physician in Oakland, Calif. Mark Morocco is a Los Angeles physician and professor of emergency medicine. They wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.