Why do people even think about future if it, actually, doesn't even exist?

The future is like the past and the present. They are all facts. You may not be able to list as many specifics concerning the future as you might about the past, but it’s only prudent as well as downright necessary to devote a great deal of effort to preparing for it.

The word for that preparation is maintenance.

The future, to me, is simply time going by. My understanding of time, is that it is constant. Weather I die, or our galaxy explodes,or whatever, time will keep ticking. The ‘future ’ WILL happen. But like the OP says, it may be not as we intended.

As far as Why even think about it? Because it’s unwise to simply stagger forward. It’s the same reason we have senses. To see,hear,or smell what’s ahead.
It’s best to try and think several steps ahead. Better still, prepare for the worst case scenario.
This helps us develope a plan. Plans increase the likelihood of what we intend being accomplished.

A person who fails to plan, plans to fail.

You strike at the key to being present.

One only has the present moment, yet we also have the ability to plan for our intended future. Yes, there are no guarantees that the future will play out the way we plan, and most likely something unforeseen will happen. Yet we cannot ignore it.

I know I have to get ready for work in five minutes, that the train will leave in 45 minutes.

But there is a difference between planning and clinging. One does not have to live in the future to plan.

I know a young woman with developmental disabilities at a special program at a University in the midwest. I talked to her mother about her always projecting into the future. One of her coping skills is that she needs to have some certainty about when she will be at school, that her flights are scheduled, that her meal plan is set. Because it takes so much mental energy, it is important that she plan her steps.

But it is sad that she cannot be in the moment. She was leaving for her last year at school, and she was already thinking of next summer.

Have you ever been with some friends in a restaurant and one of them asks “Have you eaten at Joe’s? They have the best cake.”? Then the conversation moves to Joe’s cake even though we are eating a fantastic dessert at this place. I typically (jokingly, of course) interject and ask if they want the rest of their dessert?

Another guy is so in the moment I want to smash him – and won’t go out with him any more. When we go out he buys those lotto tickets for video ball bingo tickets that “raise money for NY state education”. No matter what we are discussing or how deep the conversation, when the game comes on, he turns into a mouth breather and watches the balls slowly fly and fall into the holes. “Damn! So close!” “Oh!!!” “Come on 7!”
You can’t ignore him – while he ignores everyone else.
Living in the present, indeed!

If I didn’t think about the future, I would not have the retirement situation I now enjoy.
According to your logic, we shouldn’t even think about the present, since it is constantly changing, and why consider the past, since it is gone?

The ideas of “past” and “future” form our conceptual framework for understanding a more fundamental aspect of our experience: cause and effect.

You could make a good case that the reality at any given moment is just the way things are right then. So-called “living in the moment”, then, would be a matter of staying with that things-as-they-are experience.

But we can’t help noticing that things change. None of the things that form the content of our moment-by-moment experience are fixed. They flow and morph and recombine and dissolve, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. At any particular moment, we can speak of the things that form the furniture, so to speak, of that moment as if they were fixed entities, but they’re actually all just transitory blips in an immense churning process.

And we also can’t help noticing that these changes aren’t random. The way things are now has something to do with both how things were and with how things will be. This is cause and effect.

You’ll see that I had to invoke the notion of time to get across what we mean by “cause and effect”. Time is the conceptual framework that allows us to make sense of this cause and effect that we observe. Physicists are divided on the question of whether or not there is a reality corresponding to our concepts of “past” and “future”, but whether or not they actually exist, they are useful tools for thinking about cause and effect.

You’re right that we’re lousy at knowing what the future will be like. That’s not because cause and effect is unreliable; it’s because there are too many causes at work for us to be able to take them all into consideration. It’s not stupid or useless for us to do something in this moment in order to set the right conditions for a particular outcome. What’s stupid is to think that we’ve got a grip on how all of the other swirls and eddies in the stream of conditions will cause things to work out.

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“Only Man can conceive the concept of time.” (Is that a quote??) So only Man could conceive the concept of the future. We know it will come to pass, but in what way? So we roll the figurative dice and play the inevitable odds. Life is, after all, a game of chance.

We think about the future for the same reason that a dog licks his balls: because we can.

Because the future is the only thing we can affect. The past has already happened, you can’t change that. The present is merely the result of things you did in the past. The future, no matter how uncertain, can be affected by what you do next. Choose wisely.

That’s the way we humans are. It’s why we think about the past, too. Pretty sure we’re the only animals on the planet who think in such abstract terms.

It’s for the same reason that you would even ask this question.

If one looks at this world as a one-time crap shoot, it doesn’t matter, once it is over, one will never know it was over. If this is a one-time crap shoot to spend thinking of other than how to get all you can, how you can, however you can is a waste of thought.

I like to entertain philosophical thoughts like these when I have the time and energy, but most of the time I am living in the real world where I know I will suffer consequences if I don’t plan ahead. Regardless of whether you want to say the future “doesn’t exist,” this remains true.

The beauty about being human is our ability to dream and turn our dreams into reality. I have seen remarkable human achievements in my lifetime that 100 years ago were merely pipe dreams and today technology makes nearly any dream possible. Your dreams, my dreams and other peoples dreams will affect all of our futures and we as individuals have the most control over our own futures. My only caveat is expect the unexpected to occur in the future.

We can only think in terms of past and future. The present, on the other hand, cannot be thought of at all…it can only be experienced.

We allow ourselves the illusion of past-ing and future-ing (thinking) to coexist, survive and give meaning to life…

…even if the meaning we give to life is the illusion of something that doesn’t exist, ie. “past” and “future”.