unpublished alpha

There is a strange quirk in the way we think about things that are far away. Not far in miles, necessarily, but far in time, in social connection, or even in likelihood. A marathon six months from now feels like the perfect story: the dramatic finish line, the healthy glow, the medal on the mantle. The same marathon, two days away, is a weather report, day-of logistics, and an anticipation of getting the hours of pain behind me. The event hasn’t changed, but my relationship to it has. In theor

This is the essence of Construal Level Theory (CLT), a framework that explains how psychological distance shapes the way we imagine the world. Developed by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman in the late 1990s, it makes a simple but powerful observation: the further away something feels, the more we think about it in abstract, big-picture terms; the closer it feels, the more we think about it in concrete, detail-driven terms. Far is about the why. Near is about the how.

The theory breaks distance into four categories. There’s temporal distance, which is time. There’s spatial distance, which is physical space. There’s social distance, the gap between you and another person in terms of closeness. And there’s hypothetical distance, which is how likely something is to happen. Each of these shifts the way we construe events. A trip to Japan a year from now is cherry blossoms and bullet trains. A trip to Japan tomorrow is luggage weight limits and whether you brought the right converter plug.

Once you notice this mental zoom lens, it’s everywhere. It’s why you agree to the 5 a.m. yoga class next month but curse yourself the morning it arrives. It’s why a wedding invitation feels exciting when it’s six months away and slightly burdensome the week before. It’s why you might say yes to a speaking engagement without thinking through the travel, the slide deck, or the scheduling headaches. The shift from high-level construal to low-level construal is as automatic as breathing, and just as hard to notice in the moment.

I have started trying to catch myself in these shifts, not because I think they are inherently bad, but because they can make me a hostage to my own optimism or dread. One trick I’ve found is to imagine a far-off commitment as if it were tomorrow. If someone asks me to take on a project in six months, I picture it happening right now. Do I still want to do it? This has quietly saved me from saying yes to things that sound noble in the abstract but exhausting in reality.

The reverse is also useful. When I am in the weeds of a near-term task I do not want to do, like reconciling expenses, I will deliberately zoom out to the high-level reason for doing it. Invoices become about sustaining my work, not just chasing money. Expense reports become about keeping a system running smoothly, not about the receipts themselves. It doesn’t make the task fun, but it makes it feel worth finishing.

There’s also something to be said for planning with both construal levels at once. When I commit to a new habit, like running twice a week, I try to hold both the vision and the routine in mind. The vision is the high-level construal: feeling strong, having more energy. The routine is the low-level: Tuesday and Thursday mornings, same route, same shoes by the door. Without both, it is easy to quit—too much vision and it becomes fantasy, too much routine and it becomes drudgery.

The more I have read about CLT, the more I see its relevance outside of my own calendar. Social media has collapsed distances in odd ways. We now see vivid details of events on the other side of the world, making them feel psychologically close even if they are physically far. Conversely, issues happening in our own cities can remain abstract if they only reach us as headlines. This mismatch between the actual distance and the felt distance can change how much we care, how we talk about it, and whether we act.

The theory also hints at why certain big-picture problems are so hard to solve. Climate change lives at a high-level construal for most people: decarbonize the economy, protect the planet. But the actual work is low-level: replace a gas boiler with a heat pump, install solar panels on a specific building. Moving between these levels is awkward. Politicians tend to speak in high-level language because it inspires. Contractors work in low-level terms because that is how things get built. If you can’t translate between the two, you lose momentum.

Even relationships follow the same pattern. Strangers are easy to think about in high-level terms. We project qualities onto them the way we might project traits onto a city we’ve never visited. Close friends and family members are a mess of low-level details: habits, quirks, moments of irritation, the way they take their coffee. When a relationship feels strained, sometimes zooming out to the high-level view can help. Remember why you value the person in the first place. When you feel too distant from someone, zooming in on a specific detail can make them feel more real and less abstract.

My favorite part of CLT is that it doesn’t demand you pick one level of thinking. It’s about switching lenses on purpose. If I’m lost in the minutiae of a project, I can pull back to the why. If I’m coasting on a vague dream, I can zoom in until I see the first step I can take today. And in those moments when the lens feels stuck—when I can’t stop idealizing something far away or nitpicking something close—I can at least recognize the distortion for what it is.

The day before a recent trip, I found myself doing both at once. At the high level, I was imagining the trip as a story I would tell: great food, old friends, maybe even a little inspiration for work. At the low level, I was sorting socks and double-checking my passport. Neither view was wrong. But the awareness that they were two different mental modes kept me from letting the socks ruin the story, or the story distract me from packing the socks.

If Construal Level Theory has a moral, it’s that life is never just the grand narrative or just the fine print. It’s both, switching places depending on where you stand. The art is to be fluent in each view, to know when to step back for perspective and when to step forward for clarity. The marathon six months from now and the marathon tomorrow are the same event, but you are a different person in relation to each. Recognizing that can turn you from a passive subject of your shifting perspective into something closer to an active director.

You can’t stop the lens from moving, but you can learn to adjust the focus. And sometimes that is enough to make faraway dreams more realistic and immediate problems more bearable.