I completely agree that we need to spend time with love ones. I often get so involved with the things that I do that I end up not spending enough time with my fiancee.

I should spend more time with the people I truly care about.

But it’s true that you have to balance your resources. For me, that is having time now for myself and for the ones I love instead of later, and to connect in a deep way. Work life gets into that way far too often and I have to remind myself to slow down.

I guess everyone needs to find out what’s truly important to him/her and just follow that need without thinking too much about the Joneses.

For me, having a financially stable future is “very” important. At this point, it is more important than many other things. This may change in the future, but I can only comment on how it is right now. I may suffer because I don’t turn on the A/C, but I believe it is the right choice because I can in the future. I believe in imporving life over time, instead of having to worry about a degrading lifestyle in the future.

But what if you’re unlucky enough to live until the day after tomorrow?

As in engineering, life is about trade-offs. In the short run, we have to eat. In the long run, we’re going to be dead anyway. We need to balance between the two extremes, and there is an opportunity cost to our decisions. Time is something you don’t get back. How will the choices we make today balance out over the course of our lives.

Personally, I think the proper balance is somewhere between having four cars, and risking heat stroke by not running the air conditioner in the one car you have.

marylandterps: You are right in that we all need balance. It is definitely hard to do though since living good now is directly hurting the potential of living good later. Hopefully I can find a balance one of these days since I believe I’m more on the “save too much” side at this point in my life.