Using a discount rate is a decent start, but it is a vast simplification of how people think. If we want to make it a little more nuanced to capture more of the human condition, I would suggest:

1. Allowing one's discount rate to vary with age.

2. Varying the time horizon. Exponential decay probably doesn't map very well to how people think across different phases of life.

For many people, their discounting may change roughly as follows:

- When you first pop out, life is only the present.

- When young, e.g. 2 or 3 years old, kids may want things very soon, within seconds, minutes, maybe hours.

- Young'uns start to understand money. They might look towards saving for their first bicycle. Now time horizons look more like 1 to 12 months.

- As people start to develop educational and professional goals, they allow more deferred gratification: preparing for their career or buying a house. This horizon might be around 1 - 10 years.

- Somewhere in a career, people might start planning 5 - 50 years out, often for for kids and retirement.

- As people approach their end of expected lifespan (or face a life threatening illness), they probably care a lot about:

-- personally, living in the moment. This might mean checking off the bucket list as well as high quality relationships

-- financially, allocating money away from themselves towards emphasizing long-term, inter-generational goals, like providing for their family or donating to charity. These goals have 20+ year horizons.

- The ultra wealthy have the means to create charities with 50+ year time horizons via an endowment.

there’s a midwit meme here

do things that are good

ultimately no one knows when we will expire

balance is hard and sometimes it’s nice to look back and say oh i worked so hard for nothing but the experience of working hard and that’s okay too

we all end in the same place

“nothing is good or bad, thinking makes it so”