This book is forcing me to wrestle with the idea of time preference and has given me a more nuanced perspective. It’s easy to adopt the Austrian framing of low time preference wholesale, but I think there’s an important distinction between avoiding the hedonic treadmill and status games versus intentionally pursuing a high-quality life. Time has a real price, and every day we’re implicitly deciding what it’s worth.

Low time preference makes sense for things that compound meaningfully: wealth, family, wisdom, health, and long-term purpose, while still remembering to actually live in the present. The mistake isn’t spending time or money today, it’s spending them unconsciously on things that don’t move the needle.