[sokoloff]

I have some sympathy with your perspective and still live my life a lot aligned to that mindset.

But the idea that you should wait until a lunch break to do <any actually important life thing> suggests that work and generating income is strictly higher priority than living.

For the same reason that you “pay yourself first” to save for retirement, you probably should think even more strictly about how you prioritize your time.

So sure it’s a metaphor, but a well-chosen one.

[randallsquared]

> I have some sympathy with your perspective and still live my life a lot aligned to that mindset.

I've struggle with this as well. I think the key is to avoid thinking "priority" as one dimensional.

A goal can be high-priority because it is urgent. Continuing to work until today's lunch break is more urgent than calling your parents, because you can only work until today's lunch break today, while you can call your parents at any time.

A goal can be high-priority because it is important. As a goal, calling your parents may be more important than continuing to work until today's lunch break.

In order to avoid the outcome that calling my parents is important, but I haven't called them in months because it was never urgent, I have to increase the urgency of the goal by constraining it in time: It's important to call my parents, and urgent to call my parents before the upcoming holiday.

[CydeWeys]

That doesn't make sense. Having reasonable scheduling doesn't imply strict prioritization. It makes no difference whether you call your parents now or in two hours. You can't live a productive meaningful life using short term unscheduled strict prioritization.

[kyanne]

Does prioritizing work truly make one's life more meaningful? Does being productive for a company (less abstractly, for someone else, whoever owns the capital) really give life purpose?

Work that is not benefitting your community and strengthening the bonds between others is worth putting off for a ten minute phone call with those who love you.

[CydeWeys]

You do need to prioritize work to some extent because if you don't then you'll be unable to maintain a job, and then you'll have no money and be homeless and unable to feed yourself. Your life will be a lot worse in aggregate than if you merely prioritized work to at least some extent and were able to maintain an income to pay for creature comforts.

You can't just, at every moment, prioritize whatever is most fulfilling or heartwarming or whatever at that moment, and then have it negatively affect other long-term important stuff like maintaining your income. I'm not gonna skip a meeting that people are expecting me to attend to call my mom when it can wait until later in the day. If she were on her deathbed -- of course. but she's not.

That is all overly sanctimonious.