The 50/50 rule. (Or, "Should You Really Just Live For The Moment?")

 The 50/50 Rule.

    Who is more valuable: Yourself now, or your future self?
    Memes are floating all over the internet telling you how you should always live for the moment. But it doesn't take much to realize that approach to life isn't without its problems. If you don't spend some time preparing for the future, (perhaps by working to earn money) you will likely be in a situation you don't want to find yourself in. Possibly without shelter, food, adequate clothing, or (gasp!) cell service.
    However, if you only spend your time working and saving for the future, you won't have much of a life now. And you might die before you expect, effectively wasting your life preparing for a future that you didn't have.
So throughout your life, what is the best way to allocate the one most valuable resource we have?
    One major problem with figuring out the answer to this question is the fact that we have no idea how long we are going to live. We know the average life expectancy of US citizens, (78.7 years) but your life might be significantly shorter or longer. Heck, we might even soon see technology that enables people to live indefinitely, assuming they never get blown up or melted in vat of acid. So unfortunately, all we can do is represent your life in terms of percentages.
    If you were to spend all of your time living for the moment, this is what a graph of your life would look like:

    And this is if you spent all of your time living for the future:

    The fundamental problem with only living for the future is that there is no room to ever enjoy life. It's always about the future. Even when you get to the future.
The problem with only living for the present is that you are effectively ruining life for yourself in the future. These are both problematic. So what if you averaged them together? You'd get this:

You are effectively spending half of your time for the moment, and half for the future.
    But what about the fact that life is allegedly finite? Shouldn't we spend more time living for the moment the older we get? I mean, once you're old, you've got little left to lose, right? This is what that would look like:

But wait! Statistically, the longer you live, the more likely you are to die! So shouldn't you live more for the moment when you're younger? That would be something like this:

Well, the last graph doesn't make any sense, does it? Why would you spend more time living for the future the older you get? Your future is theoretically shrinking, and your likelihood of dying is going up! But living for the moment when you're young means having to spend more time saving for your older years in your midlife. These graphs are simplified ideals, obviously. But once again, if you average the graphs together, you get this:

Once again, we're back to 50/50.
    Every time I have come up with a reason to slant the graph one way or another, I have always found something that averaged it back to 50%. So it presently would appear that the best way to allocate your time is following what I call the 50/50 rule. Spend 50% of your time living for the moment, and 50% living for the future. Because you know that not preparing for the future is unwise. And you don't know what the future holds, or how much of it you have.


Ps. I'm sure there are good critiques of this thought. Please let me know what they are in a gentle and tactful manner. ;)