The math doesn’t necessarily work out that way. If you value the good stuff linearly, the optimal course of action will either be to spend all your resources right away (because the high discount rate makes the future too risky) or to save everything for later (because you can get such a high return on investment that spending any now would be wasteful). Even in a more realistic case where utility is logarithmic with, for example, computation, anticipation of much higher efficiency in the far future could lead to the optimal choice being to use essentially the bare minimum right now.
I think there are reasonable arguments for putting some resources toward a good life in the present, but they mostly involve not being able to realistically pull off total self-deprivation for an extended period of time. So finding the right balance is difficult, because our thinking is naturally biased to want to enjoy ourselves right now. How do you “cancel out” this bias while still accounting for the limits of your ability to maintain motivation? Seems like a tall order to achieve just by introspection.
The math doesn’t necessarily work out that way. If you value the good stuff linearly, the optimal course of action will either be to spend all your resources right away (because the high discount rate makes the future too risky) or to save everything for later (because you can get such a high return on investment that spending any now would be wasteful). Even in a more realistic case where utility is logarithmic with, for example, computation, anticipation of much higher efficiency in the far future could lead to the optimal choice being to use essentially the bare minimum right now.
I think there are reasonable arguments for putting some resources toward a good life in the present, but they mostly involve not being able to realistically pull off total self-deprivation for an extended period of time. So finding the right balance is difficult, because our thinking is naturally biased to want to enjoy ourselves right now. How do you “cancel out” this bias while still accounting for the limits of your ability to maintain motivation? Seems like a tall order to achieve just by introspection.