Seems to me like humans do lots of things for distant benefits: they die for ideals, work their whole lives to give their children a better future, save for retirement, produce research on subjects that will only achieve tangible outcomes in the distant future, etc
Sometimes. This is not something generally expected of people, and newsworthy when it happens. Not all ideals are also selfless - some, like loyalty to one's God in expectation of an afterlife, is directly selfish.
> work their whole lives to give their children a better future
A combination of biological imperative and social pressure older than civilization; also pretty selfish.
> save for retirement
Most people can't really do that, especially not when living paycheck-to-paycheck. That's why retirement funds tend to be done in opt-out and usually socialized fashion.
> produce research on subjects that will only achieve tangible outcomes in the distant future
Even ignoring the status seekers, pure intellectual curiosity gives short-term emotional rewards. I doubt most researchers would be able to sustain their efforts if they didn't feel at least some immediate intellectual reward that outweighed their lowered (or sometimes non-existent) salaries.
My point isn't that individuals aren't capable of putting long-term benefits in front of their short-term interests. My point is that they aren't capable of doing it at scale, in a coordinated fashion. A lot of this boils down to coordination problems - when personal sacrifice has low marginal utility (i.e. you need to get a lot of people on-board to materialize the benefits) and high immediate cost, few people will choose the sacrifice, and even if a small group coordinates on this, the first person to defect will destroy it all.
And still, a politician who says that airplane ticket and meat prices should rise to levels unaffordable by the bottom 95% won't get elected. It's too unpopular. Despite quite many people in non-western countries not flying in airplanes and only eating meat on rare occasions.
