How University Students Think About the Next Fifty Years: Future Orientation and Career Decision-Making

Future orientation predicts career decision-making, yet its temporal extension—how far ahead people project—is rarely varied. This study asked 15 higher-education students at a regional Turkish university to reflect on their lives fifty years hence, an intentionally over-extended horizon chosen to make the handling of extension observable. Interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four domains were examined: the framing of the distant future, anticipated regret, the relation between present circumstances and future possibility, and the appraisal of one’s own effort. Nine participants answered at the horizon as posed, in registers ranging from aspiration to enumerated uncertainty; three declined it, two substituted a nearer frame, and one gave an answer that could not be classified with confidence. Positive distant-future images did not uniformly ease decision-making, and anticipated regret appeared in four distinguishable regulatory forms. Implications for career counseling are advanced as hypotheses.