Every time you discuss the future [in English], grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different.

Chen is pointing to a structural feature of English—its frequent requirement to mark futurity with auxiliaries like “will” or “going to”—and arguing that this habitual grammatical separation can make the future feel psychologically more distant from the present. The claim aligns with his broader research program on “future time reference” (FTR): languages that grammatically obligate speakers to distinguish present from future may encourage people to treat future outcomes as less immediate, potentially weakening saving, health, or other long-horizon behaviors. The quote’s significance lies less in a strict determinism claim than in highlighting how routine linguistic habits might subtly shape temporal perception and decision-making.