Future or Present Perfect

It is weird, all I could think about when they told me that Will died was "he should have gone to the game." You see, he had a ticket to a world cup game, a good World Cup game. For anyone that knows about events such as that one, you know how hard it is to get a hold of a ticket. Will entered a raffle months before the Cup and months before we finished our time in England. A couple of weeks before we finished he found out that he was the proud owner of a ticket. It was late in the year and he had already bought his ticket back to the US. To stay meant that he had to postpone his flight by a week and find places to stay until the game. It also meant that he would miss a job interview. He agonized over it and ended up selling the ticket and going back to the US. It seems pointless now. The job he interviewed for, the couple dollars he saved, they are all dust now. His plans for the future now mean nothing, the only thing that counts is what he did, the experiences he had.
In these cases no real conclusions can be drawn, only a myriad of questions without answers. His story paints a picture full of irony and unfairness. Will was the kind of guy who was always making plans... plans seem so pointless in the context of death. Everything that we prepare, every conjecture about the future, is mere abstraction and fantasy until it is completed. It is interesting because we treat the future as something concrete, while really it is nothing at all. A published work of fiction has more substance than a dream, a goal, or a set of plans about the future. It made me think, we can't live our lives focusing on the future. We waste the present by sacrificing it for future gains. A certain level of planning is inevitable, but doesn't it make more sense to live for the present? I see people who sacrifice everything for 10 years in order to get something 15 years down the line. It now seems like a pointless gamble. They could end up dying in 9 years and all they have to show for it is years of nothing. I guess what I am trying to say is "carpe diem"