Maximizing discounted future cash flow often gives you the option of scaling back those hours you're trading for cash. Want more leisure time? Earn more during the hours that you are working!

HN is so myopic they cant conceive of anything else. Life is obviously an equation that can be tweaked, "hacked", and gamified.

No matter your goal(s) you can always treat it like that.

Just that with most humanly shaped goals, the formula would be too complicated to be tractable, especially since you have to account for all your guesses of the unknown. People don't even know what makes them happy before they live through it, and you can only live through so many experiences.

So we `give up' and rely on rules-of-thumb and call them wisdom. And mostly we should!

It's not all discounted future cashflow, it's discounted future utility. And a lot of people get the best part of their utility from family, friends, and relationships. Finding a reasonably prosperous position from which to secure a future with your family may be the best investment one can make.

Academia's contribution to that position is a murky proposition (added debt without added earnings potential undermines financial security). And while there are certainly immediate rewards from the pursuit of intellectual goals and from your friends at university, you can also get not-too-dissimilar rewards and more cash doing something like programming computers. And then you can use the cash to do things like: honeymoon with your wife in South America, enroll your child in a really good arts or music program, or spoil your grandchildren with a study-abroad semester in Europe.