The real wisdom of Joe’s advice isn’t to always spend everything you earn and to keep betting on an ever brighter future. No, the key takeaway, I now realize, is to strike the right balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.

When we’re infants, we get very little enjoyment out of money. Babies are expensive to take care of, true, but it’s not like they get a lot of enjoyment from spending money. When you’re a baby, there’s no greater happiness than Mom and the crib. In a way, the amount of utility that babies get from money is very similar to what the elderly get. Mone

Look, if all you want is to have a pile of money at the end, well, I guess that’s your choice. But bear in mind that I have never seen somebody’s total net worth posted on their tombstone.

gratification.

It pays to invest early. The earlier you start investing, the more time you have to reap your memory dividends.

and trying to plan out all the various activities, events, and experiences you’d like to have. Time buckets are proactive and let you plan your life; a bucket list, on the other hand, is a much more reactive effort in a sudden race against time.

In sum, from my perspective, the years you spend earning that extra $500,000 do not make up for (let alone surpass) the number of experience points you lost by working for more money instead of enjoying those five years of free time.

Think about how you can actively enhance your memory dividends. Would it help you to take more photos of your experiences? To plan reunions with people you’ve shared good times with in the past? Compile a video or a photo album?

When I first talked about dying with zero, I told you about the people who will understandably protest that they enjoy their work—so what’s the harm with money earned from that kind of “work enjoyment” and seeing it going unused in your life? As I already said there, optimization doesn’t care where the money comes from—once you get the money, you o