Conversation

Finally figured out why idling and wasting time is so hard in pandemic time. When you goof off and procrastinate for an hour, your work is pushed an hour out but the waste-time hour inserted isn’t taken from the tail end of your operating horizon. The NPV is near zero.
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Concretely, an hour taken from 18 months (notional “time to vaccine”) away at a monthly discount rate of say 1% is worth 0.8345 hours now or 50min. But taken from 20 years or 240 months away, 0.0896 hours now or about 5 minutes.
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When you waste an hour the work deferred still retains 99% of its value, but the hour substituted from the low value tail of “life” expectancy can range from 5 minutes to 50. You’re only really wasting 5 minutes of life by procrastinating an hour in some sense. So you can relax.
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Heavily discounted future is foreshortened future. Uncertainty drives up unconscious mental discounting. But discounting below a threshold makes us act as though that hour won’t be available at all. Our future past that becomes dead to us. We can’t manage that time.
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This is a non-hedonistic response to a sense of foreshortened future. I’m not a hedonist but I suspect hedonists at some level of foreshortening begin frenzied partying. “Last meal” effect.