[terrabitz]

This is one of the reasons I like YNAB (both their app and their method). One of their core principles is to align your spending -- including future spending, aka saving -- with your values. Spending on the wrong things isn't good, but neither is saving without clear purpose.

My wife and I both came from fairly frugal households growing up, so frugality is often our default. It's been a helpful exercise to periodically ask ourselves "what do we actually value, and what tradeoffs should we make", then update our plan to match.

[the_snooze]

This is really the heart of it. Understand what matters to you, and align your finances (and decisions as a whole) with that. If you optimize for some external metric without examining your own values, you're basically adrift.