The PV of Future Happiness

Can you wait? He asked me.

Yes I can. I sighed, but I’d rather have it right here and now.

If you are locked in a room with a beautiful lady for an hour, and you can choose to kiss her in the first minute or the last minute of the hour, which one will you choose?

The majority would prefer the first minute. No surprise.

1 Dollar values more today and less tomorrow, the future cashflow will have to be discounted to get the present value. It’s not about finance, even; it’s human nature.

Someone may argue that the anticipation built up through waiting will make the final realization much more favorable and satisfactory. Not necessarily.

Why? Because we are ultimately helpless and vulnerable.

We are so afraid that bad things will happen in the future so let’s don’t worry about it until it actually happens. Let’s be happy today if we can be happy at all. Let’s over-spent, let’s abuse our relationships, let’s get wasted, let’s for once not to worry about consequences and set ourselves free.

We don’t care about future not because we don’t want to but we cannot, so we initiate some sort of self-protection mechanism.

Some people call this risk-aversive. If you start to secretly calculate the PV of almost everything (including future happiness), and automatically reject anything that has a negative NPV, you know that finally, you have become just like everybody else.

I don’t like that idea.

I wish I could be brave enough to face my future problems as of today; and strong enough to be patient with the blossoms in my life.

But right now, still, I wish you were here with me.