The answer is, as always, "it depends." Seriously , though- I time discount to an extent, and I don't want to stop totally. I prefer more happiness to less, and I don't want to stop. (I don't care about ending date, and I'm not sure why I would want to). If a trade off exists between starting date, quality, and duration of a good situation, I'll prefer one situation over the other based on my utility function. A better course of action would be to try and get more information about my utility function, rather than debating which value is more sacred than the rest.