The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain.

Consequences run on a long delay, and the delay is what makes them so hard to take seriously. Something enjoyable now and something painful in thirty years feel like events in different lives, which is why almost nobody weighs them properly at the time. That is a limitation in how people are built rather than a moral failing. Knowing about the gap is the only real protection against it.

You cannot make a distant cost feel present, so do not rely on feeling. Set the arrangement instead: the automatic saving, the regular check-up, the habit that runs whether or not you are motivated today.