This means to say that we identify ourselves, though in a covert manner, with an ideal to be achieved in the future, which, we hope, will bring us a larger satisfaction. That we cannot keep quiet, that we always feel a duty before us, is enough indication that we are wound up with a future. It is also not true that we wholly live in the future, because the future cannot be contained in the consciousness of the present. Time cannot take a jump beyond the present, which is its core. We might hope for the future, but we cannot live in the future.
Life is always a present.
If, then, it is impossible to have a 'real' satisfaction in the 'future', and if we cannot also live without a future, there would appear to be a tension, or contradiction, in our life. Life is a battle between the present and the future, between our affairs of today and our future hopes. The present and future cannot join in time, and yet there seems to be a superhuman element, transcending human understanding which somehow connects the two together. With all this, still, we know that the present and the future never come together. All this may look like a logical untenability, but logic is not all, and science is not everything.