It was getting dark at our campsite, and we were in the process of starting the fire and preparing dinner. As the light faded more, it was becoming more difficult to see. I was bringing things across our site, and there were all sorts of roots, stones, and uneven terrain to watch out for. Thankfully, we had these small headlamps that we had recently bought. I even had one on my head, and turned it on briefly, but then I turned it off because I was still able to see a bit. Upon noticing this, my brother asked why I didn’t have the headlamp on. I replied that I was saving the battery. He laughed and said, “Saving it for what? This is what it’s meant for”.

He had a point. We had gotten the headlamps so that we would have a convenient source of light when we were doing things after dark in an environment that wasn’t lit. That was exactly the situation that we were in, and yet I had decided to save the battery for another time. “What was I saving if for?”, I thought to myself. Presumably, I was saving it for some hypothetical time when I might need it more desperately, a time when being deprived of it would have worse consequences than in the present situation. One obvious objection to this is that such a hypothetical situation might never come to pass, or might take so long to happen that whatever was being saved would have spoiled or lapsed in the meantime. Almost everyone has a story about postponing something so long that they never actually get to do it.

A more fundamental objection occurred to me though. Even granting that I might, in a not too remote future, encounter a more troublesome situation requiring a headlamp, could I even say that the headlamp would be needed more in that case? It actually seemed to me that it would be needed just as much under those circumstances as at this moment at the campsite. In a very real sense, the headlamp was just as useful for preparing dinner as it might be, for example, for trying to find a way out of a cave. The fact that being trapped in a cave had higher stakes didn’t make the headlamp less useful or necessary for gathering firewood. The headlamp was at peak utility in either event because the circumstances corresponded exactly to the use case for the headlamp. I should have been elated to find myself in precisely a situation in which the headlamp’s particular value could be exploited.

More recently, I was given a nice bottle of wine. This is exactly the type of thing that’s prone to being saved indefinitely. Each time an opportunity to enjoy it presents itself, it’s dismissed as unworthy. Years later, one might still have the bottle, unsure if the wine in it is still good. To guard against this, I thought to myself that I would instead positively be on the lookout for a situation in which I could use. I wouldn’t consume it casually, but I wouldn’t hesitate to have it when I recognized an occasion for which the wine was appropriate. That was enough: it didn’t have to be more than that because nothing beyond that would make the wine any more suitable. The occasion could be just making a nice boeuf bourguignon.