Hal Finney at Overcoming Bias ponders the nature and consequences of present orientation.

It relates to one of the most curious of human failures, our inability to successfully act in our own self-perceived best interest. Now it's not clear that this is actually a case of bias in the sense of inability to see the truth. It may be the case that we often take actions we know we will regret, and fully and correctly predict our attitudes and responses throughout the time in which we will experience the consequences of our actions. Yet we find that as we move from one time period to the next, we perceive that the actions that we have taken were not in our self-interest.

Herb Gintis thinks it is.

. . . humans, like all other animals, do not maximize fitness, but rather an objective function (which may be called a preference function) based on immediate costs and benefits, that has evolved to correspond to fitness enhancement. . .

. . . humans (like other animals, although much less so) tend to have preference functions that are excessively present-oriented, and so undervalue behaviors with long-term payoffs (Google Ainslie, Laibson, and Loewenstein for documentation). Cultural beliefs and values that counter this tendency (e.g., be slow to anger, invest in good hunting skills) are fitness enhancing but will be judged to be welfare reducing by the sociopath who assesses them according to his own preference function.

This, according to Gintis, is an evolved tendency, the nature of the beast. It's not invariant and not absolute, but when looking at populations there is a clear tendency.

The context of Finney's inquiry is an evaluation of soft-paternalism.

Robin pointed a few years ago to a paper by Caplin and Leahy which discussed some similar issues: The Social Discount Rate (pdf). They argued that inconsistent time preferences were a dominant feature of human psychology and suggested that social welfare could be improved via institutions to encourage (or coerce) a longer-term perspective in human action. Caplin and Leahy want to overthrow the "dictatorship of the present" and give future selves a greater say in decisions which will affect their welfare.

I am not convinced about these issues; it's confusing to consider one's future self as a different person. And there is also the problem of uncertainty, in that I don't know what his circumstances will be or if he will even be alive. I think this does justify a certain amount of discounting of his preferences over those of the present self, but probably not as much as is commonly done.

There may be a larger issue and a longer view.

It follows that the widespread existence of false beliefs and personally harmful values, despite producing major maladaptions in many cases, nevertheless contributes to the success of Homo sapiens. In particular, the above-outlined mechanism allow for the evolutionary stability of altruistic cooperation and punishment, which are the basic underpinnings of social cooperation in humans

This is another aspect of the adverse consequences of the short sighted and narrow perspectives of would-be social engineers. A hyper focus on the individual fails to notice immediate social consequences, and is itself excessively present oriented, failing to consider the long term consequences for society. How twee.