One think that can be derived from my theory but have not said it directly, so I should elaborate more:
Stimuli from the environment traverse the neural connections and reach the driving forces. By agitating the driving forces they create driving pockets that represent your pleasure potential (all known till here). If the connection between the current stimuli and the driving force is not very thick, then the signal will deteriorate somewhat along the path and will create a smaller driving pocket. Thus we will not be as keen to act on the current stimuli, because we won’t expect as much pleasure!
This is why humans are so shortsighted in their motives and reward expectations. They are engineered to look for ephemeral pleasures and not goals and future pleasures that will come after a lot of suffering. Because the current suffering (strong stimulus, close to DF, big Driving Pocket) will be compared to the much further pleasure probability (weak stimulus due to distance from the DF, weak DP) and the person will choose the easiest route. That is why to plan far ahead into the future and keep your discipline you need a very big reward promised for the future (so that the signal does not dissipate, because it is now closer to the DF, because the big reward is closer to the DF pattern-matching-wise) or you need another reason to get this big DP that you need. For example religion uses a big future fear to compensate for the current suffering to deter people from indulging in ephemeral pleasures and thus the alternative of future doubtful pleasure becomes plausible now and, despite its weak DP, the person chooses to act by it. And to be on the safe side they make sure that they emphasize all the time how certain your future pleasure is in order to forge a path from their stimuli to your driving force and thus create bigger driving pockets (because if the path is thicker, the signal dissipates less and thus agitates more the DF and creates a bigger DP).
Concluding, the distance of the environmental stimuli from the DFs, because it is translated into less activation of DPs (which are our motives for action) make us shortsighted in our goals.
We could even expand this rationale and say that people that are more shortsighted in their decisions versus their peers may even have a structural characteristic in their brain function that increases the "resistance" from neural hop to neural hop and thus increases signal dissipation.
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