Ah, but that is easy for the [-]geezers[/-] senior citizens who "have arrived" to say that.
I was thinking of the younger folks in their 30s and 40s, who, unless they have very well-paid jobs, if they think about FIRE'ing, will have to run FIRECalc to see if buying a nice car or taking a foreign vacation would cost them another year of work. This kind of thread keeps coming up. Yes, they have to find the balance between enjoying the fruit of their labor now ("Live for Today") vs. beefing up their savings in order to have margins against the vagaries of the market, the uncertainties of their medical care costs, etc...
It was that kind of "shall I plan to work another year" decision that I was trying to describe, and it was my fault for not being lucid.
We keep preaching delayed gratification, and to keep our SWR low because projection of medical advances shows that we will live to 100. Yet, we also have posters like meadbh telling us how a friend of hers expired a mere 2 months after the diagnosis of a terminal disease. I myself have seen so many people dropping dead from heart attacks or strokes while in their 50s. Well, at least they did not have to linger to ponder the question of what if, to ask themselves what they could have done differently.
I do not know the statistics, but suspect that those sad situations occur far more often than the chance to win the lottery grand prize. People often buy lottery tickets hoping to get that prize, but sadly, their chance of an early meeting with the grim reaper may be several orders of magnitude higher.
I have often said here that my younger brothers and their spouses are bigger spenders than we are. We were a bit worried and did once hint to them the danger of job loss, or illnesses that may keep them from continuing to earn that high pay. To that, one of my brothers said that if it came to that, they were ready to downgrade their lifestyle, to lose their McMansion and move into a trailer. If that happened, they could say they had been there, done that, and would not regret it.
So, I see their "instant gratification" philosophy as making some senses too. Who is to say what's right or wrong? And by the way, they occasionally complain about their work environment, but it was no more than people complaining about the weather. Obviously, their jobs were tolerable, else they would have thought differently about spending.