This is giving me a bit of a Zizek-ian "wisdom" feeling. E.g. in "Putting things off for the future is the biggest waste of a life. You deny yourself the present by promising the future." one can make the counter-argument of the entire marshmallow experiment with children where the whole point is to actually put things off for the future!
I've always liked the marshmallow experiment, but it turns out less clear than we may have thought.
If a child trusts the adult will be back shortly with marshmallow in tow, they may wait. But if adults in their lives are less predictable, they may reasonably choose to eat the marshmallow before the adult returns.
The marshmallow experiment may show that kids that can trust adults do better in life.
No, take things now if you can. And I can, with a very small amount of creativity involved. I realized recently I don't need to be rich/financially independent at all.
I work 4 days per week, I'm living the dream as I've realized that I want to work for 3 days per week. I want to crack my brain on something for 3 days per week that I'm not necessarily passionate about, but that feels as "good brain exercise" (aka programming).
So I only have to put up with 1 day per week, but I also want a bit of that I need to "put up with something", so 4 days per week is my jam, apparently. Programming allows me to stay mentally sharp, so it's a health thing as well.
My free day is on a Wednesday, so my rhythm literally is along the lines of:
work, work, rest, work, work, rest, bonus rest*
* Aka go nuts/crazy since I'm already rested.
You can have your cake and eat it too. Provided if you're Dutch, because a 4 day work week is easy to fix there.
4 days means you make about 85 to 90% of your 5 day net salary anyway, so you're not losing too much cash. It's easily doable if you spent 70% of your income anyway, which is what I was doing (and that is me being wasteful).
Yeah, those who refuse to bargain with the future end up the same as those who refuse to bargain at car dealerships. They pay the worst prices.
Even hunter gatherers sacrifice for the future. I haven't read much Seneca, but this article strikes me as a shallow interpretation of him just from its Instagram-quote-ey notes that are thrown in every now and then
