Everything You Can’t Have

- Consuming is usually bad for the environment, even if you're rich. Being satisfied conserves resources.

- The work you devote to something gives it its value. I appreciate good food, good art, good engineering and good woodworking because I have repeatedly attempted them. If you just buy stuff without consideration, you rob yourself of a finer experience.

Freedom.

Owning better material items is only meant to facilitate freedom. I'm not a collector and never will be, even if I inherit two billion bucks tomorrow.

Examples:

- I'll get an expensive bike so me and my wife can go on an impulsive picnic in the outskirts of the city.

- I'll get an extra house in rural France so we're free to go there if we need the scenery for a few weeks (but will otherwise allow a local family to take care of it).

- I'll just invent stuff in my shed -- or compose the programs I always wanted to write on my computers -- if I'm never worried about money in the future.

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Rich people getting bored and even unhappy is just lack of imagination, intellectual and physical laziness.

Being rich and unhappy is entirely on them. It can be much better in every way but they're too busy complaining about non-issues to see it.

My hack around this was to recognize the only things that were valuable cost time. Fast way to do that was by recognizing the difference between the symbol or representation of something, and its real effect. As a symbol, money makes it it really easy to acquire other symbols, but that's all they are. Instead, get good at something, and even use some money to make opportunity (buy the time, your own or someone elses) to do it, but the more money you spend on them the less satisfying they are. An example is buying an expensive instrument to take beginner lessons, where learning on one can be so unsatisfying and humiliating relative to its symbolic value as to discourage you from pursuing it. The basic absurdity of culture is the belief that if you consume enough symbols of desire you eventually become one - and also perhaps that it is for the lack of those symbols that you are not normal or desirable. Symbols certainly help us negotiate the culture around us, but they are not the substrate or the real.

A quant once told me that the ideal portfolio lets you both eat well and sleep well, but they come at a cost to each other, so good luck with managing, i.e. extracting value from - money. It's not a problem I have, or one that I particularly envy because I mainly value time, and index on sleeping well over eating well.

Everyone has a lived existence.

Everyone is trying to optimize their lived experience.

Are you saying a person’s occupation should preclude them from asking “What’s the right way for me to live?”