Your intentions in the present moment act as a cause for things coming in the future that will be good to experience or painful to experience.

"They’ve been making a big deal recently about the fact that psychologists are now studying happiness. Well, Buddhism has been studying happiness for 2,600 years. And it focuses on the most important thing that most psychologists tend to ignore, which is that the way you look for happiness is going to have strong ramifications. The actions you do, the things you do and say and think in order to attain happiness: If you’re not careful, they can lead to some very unhappy results. They can turn around and devour you. No intention is free from ramifications. In other words, anything you do with a dishonest intention is likely to lead to an experience of suffering. Even though it may yield happiness in the short term, there are long-term ramifications. You can’t get away from that fact.

The way most people live nowadays is based on the premise that it doesn’t matter what happens down along the road. “That’s in the future. I want happiness right now. I want it fast.” So people like to be told that the only thing that matters is the present moment, where that’s all there is: just the present moment. But your intentions in the present moment act as a cause for things further down the line, on into the future. You want to make sure that those things coming in the future will be good to experience. This sometimes means doing things you don’t like to do right now, but you realize that they’ll lead to a long-term happiness. Or you may have to stop yourself from doing things you’d like to do right now because they would lead to long-term pain — not just a tangy taste of pain, but the anguish of the actual thing. Your skill in talking yourself into doing what would lead to long-term happiness and into avoiding things that would lead to long-term pain: That’s one of the most important skills you can develop, not only in meditation, but in life as a whole."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Taste vs. the Reality" (Meditations4)

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