Temporal duration and misplaced value

I may end up having to explain all of my titles.  Remember, though, that there is a method to my madness.  But it likely won't come together and make sense until the end.

This morning after planning to get up a bit earlier, I hit the snooze about four times.  At about 8:50, I finally got out of bed and rode my bike over to my church, in order to help clean it.  I do have a car, but I felt like biking; part of this is because I used to love biking while serving on my LDS mission in Colorado.  Another is my pathetic lack of exercise normally.  Yet another is that it is a nice, cool morning, and I like to rush through the world completely under my own power; I can do exactly what I want to.  If I want to go faster, I pedal harder.  This may seem very simple and elementary, but the principle behind it is that I get to see exactly what my work accomplishes.  I have the ability to change my reality based on the work I decide to put in.  But that was a tangent.

After arriving at the church and starting to wash windows, I was talking with a friend about the things I'm willing to trade.  I told him that I'd come straight there from sleep, and that I had traded any time for breakfast (before cleaning, at least) for just a few more minutes of dozing; not even sleep.  He told me he'd done exactly the opposite.

I started thinking about that.  Why had I traded my breakfast for sleep?  Had it really made a difference?  What hadn't everyone else biked there like I had?


I realized that in many cases, people have lost their perspective of the future.  Our minds have become stuck in the present.  We have started to place more value on things of lesser worth and shorter duration.  Just a few examples to demonstrate:

• How many Chess players do you meet these days? Risk?  Those games are too long.  Yet you could find thousands of people at any given time playing Angry Birds or Farmville, which theoretically take less than ten minutes each.  
• Have you handwritten a letter this month?  Probably not.  Have you sent a text, 'liked' a comment, or updated your status within the last six hours? Hmm.
• From this link, I found that the average length of a song is about four minutes.  Any classical music fans out there will shake their heads at that- the average length there is probably around 20 minutes or more (I apologize for no citation there- the best I could find was WikiAnswers).

 While I did end up eating breakfast this morning after we finished cleaning, the fact remains that I still put more value on five or ten minutes of dozing (after getting plenty of rest all night) than I did on giving myself life-sustaining food.

Yes, I understand that my particular examples are very simple and not particularly horrible and life-changing, but here are more serious examples:

• Students skipping class
• One-night stands
• Sex before marriage at all (I will address why these first two are damaging- and chastity in general- in another post.)
• Incurring debt for vacations and other nonessentials
• Crime

Each of these has the same mentality: "I want this right now.  What future?"

I think I'm going to eradicate this method of thinking from my life.