The Highest Forms of Wealth
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The problem with agency, unlike what 'power' connotes you to believe; you can't just have and store it for later. Like others rightly point out in this thread, there are many avenues in life you want to be agentic but cannot solve with anything you possess, but only through becoming a required thing through transformation; examples are health, skillfulness, being understood in a relationship, an equanimous existence etc. Even then, you're to an extent up to the whims of misfortune and fortune, or if you're not allergic to that word; to fate. There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality; which connects to the original meaning of fate.
But that's not even the only problem with agency; most of the time you don't even know when you have it and also when you don't have it. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapy; you either misattribute blame where it doesn't belong or fail to hold people/yourself accountable when you should; or you miss what and how you could solve a problem but instead invest your energy and emotions in an avenue that just won't work.
Which means agency, capability of doing things that get you towards your real goals, whether you've realized them or not, is deeply tied to wisdom; knowing in which manner you're deceiving yourself be it through buying things instead of being things, or getting out of being confused about whose agency exactly lies where and where is the way out of an agentic entrapment.
Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom.
For you, apparently, that resonates.
The author contextualises his thoughts quite differently, and says something different. It may seem trivial, but to appreciate the difference, consider the first two words of this sentence from the author.
> To me, the highest form of wealth is controlling your time.
Let's take a much simpler game than life, like chess. If the chess coach said "the most important thing is controlling your time", how sufficient would that sound as a winning strategy?
Sure, time control could be important, but it doesn't really guide anyone on how to thing about the strategy and tactics. In fact, time might not even be an issue before you lose the game.
Or on the flip side, if you had infinite time, you still couldn't exhaust all the combinations of movements to decide the best move.
Cultivating wisdom means working on honing our "meta-heuristic" machinery, the heuristic that binds all our heuristics together, so that we are adaptively more likely to find and process the relevant information to achieve our goals in life. It has to dynamically assess the relevance of every other constraint of the game and cannot reduce the solution to a hardcoded normativity like "just control time" "just have more freedom" "just have more money".
I didn't read his remarks as scheduling. More like being in control of your time is being able to choose what you do, not be told what to do by someone else, or do things to please or satisfy someone else. It is a reverence for independence, which I imagine comes with or arises from wisdom, skills and wherewithal. Or luck. Whatever. What he values is freedom as much as agency.
“Knowledge isn’t power, application of knowledge is power.”
You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family.
Most are fine with sacrificing agency in order to provide for their families and their needs in a modern society, and honestly that is a noble sacrifice.
Just as in ancient times, the agency of material wealth requires the exploitation of toil.
Life is not something one can "power over", it is something we participate in.
I say this because a good chunk of the interesting problems in life are not constraints that we can power over with willful motion, nor predict or prepare for. In fact it is so common to see people who are stuck in their attempts of willful assertion over things they can't change but can't also see that fact. Others are lost in expending majority of their resources in preparation for eventualities that probably will never come but are still scary for them. Those are examples to modes of loss of agency due to misapplication of power.
In contrast to power, agency also necessitates finessing your way through obstacles and uncertainties when appropriate, in addition to having influence over your environment and conditions.
A mini version of this can be found in an analogy of boxing; punching can't be the only thing in your repertoire, you also need footwork, evasion, blocking. It requires synchrony with your opponent, you constantly adapting to it and influencing it. You can't "power" your way to victory, you have to do all of those things in appropriate configuration to get a chance at it, and even then you might not win.
> You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family.
There are two potential problems with this.
Firstly, rationally speaking one would has to sacrifice time for the exact amount of wealth they will require for these goals, and not a dime more, because overworking would just be another way of losing your agency. Not only this equilibrium point is hard to predict, most people are already stuck in wanting the more of it than calculating an approximation of the enough of it.
The second problem is, material wealth is by far not the only input to raising a happy, good family. What kind of a person you need to become to be a good enough parent, is a much more difficult proposition than how much money you need to have to send them to what college. This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things. And this inevitably causes losses in agency; as evidenced with many families that had it "all" and still came apart.
The most thought-provoking thing I’ve read in a while. Admittedly it’s a restatement of a fairly common idea (creating a material want from some other want or need) but I’ve never seen it phrased like this.
In particular, it reminded me of times I’ve bought books about some shiny new tech and only read a few pages. In hindsight, maybe it was mostly about the kind of dev I’d like to become.
Doesn't buy you individual health or invulnerability (on average it kind of does, or at least improves vs some demographics(.
Then based on this examination, one must take action and interact with the world, perhaps face fears.
From this interaction with your surroundings, you gain insight and experience. You are changed.
Repeat.
What do you think?
From TFA: 'the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”'
Hard to wake up and do whatever you want if you're paralyzed/in a coma/cripplingly depressed.
I don't feel I have much choice at all on what to do on a given day—or any single day of the year for that matter.
If you could keep the kids and everything you had, but also have even more freedom to do whatever you want (for yourself or your family - more vacations and play time, more opportunities for education and life experiences) wouldn't you feel even wealthier?
If you had less freedom (stuck working long hours, can't choose a family doctor you trust, etc), wouldn't you feel less wealthy?
Importantly, you don't have to act on the freedom to know that you have it.
Sometimes, people want to (or need to) make choices about what they want to do for the next 10 years. Having children is a choice like that (except that it's for even longer).
Making such a choice undeniably restricts your ability to revise your choices on a daily basis, but can also represent movement towards a longer term goal that might (or might not) ultimately bring even more happiness.
> I got my hair on my head
> I got my brains, I got my ears
> I got my eyes, I got my nose
> I dot my mouth, I got my smile
(I take your point about not taking good health for granted)
If you think about relationships being about giving and receiving, then what more valuable resource can you give someone than your time?
I think the issue many are running into with this article is that autonomy is a complicated subject and it covers whatever you're thinking isn't covered here.
The author obviously didn't have this in mind.
"doing whatever you want" does not equal to "stuff that satisfies for very short periods of time (i.e. not only drugs, games and tv)"
If you are in a good relationship, you can’t do whatever you want any day. The goal of the article is fundamentally incompatible with the sacrifices required for a good relationship with another human being.
Someone doesn’t get what they want in that scenario and a compromise has to be made.
"Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Note that this doesn't apply to one particular set of people, individuals with families or real obligations and people who depend on them.
You're much less good to them (up to the point to being an absentee parent because e.g. you work too much) if you don't have autonomy.
If I'm not doing one of those things I'm working, fixing something around the house, cooking, or running an errand. What I don't have is the privilege to do anything aside from what must be done.
Don't get me wrong, I love having a family but that's kind of my point: autonomy isn't worth a damn to me.
That's still autonomy, since getting into that was your decision to make. Nobody put a pistol on your head to start a family and have kids (hopefully). That's something you chose, with the restrictions that come with it. You could might as well not have started a family, and thus not having to do that.
(Not to mention that if you had more money you could delegate most of those, including making milk and changing diapers, to some helpers, and only keep the "quality" time).
Now, imagine to still "lov[ing] having a family", but being so poor you couldn't afford to start one (or nobody would marry you, because you're, say, homeless). Or having to work double shifts just to make ends meet, and only being able to be minimally present for your kids, despite wanting to be there more. That's lack of autonomy.
You do have to understand Covid changed a lot of the calculus around kids for a lot of parents. Everything has been affected: the amount of help and support you can get, the activities you can do with them.
> Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Sure you could hire help and free up more time. And that's a choice many people make. But it wouldn't sit right with me to have someone else teach my children to read, or build robots, or ride a bike if I really have the free time to do it myself.
As long as time is limited and we can't replicate ourselves to be in more than one place, some lack of autonomy is expected. But nobody talked about total autonomy here. The post, and I, mean the casual autonomy to not to be forced to do something you didn't chose at any point.
Young children you can chose to have or not (and take the time hit that goes with it).
Whereas if you have no money and need food and rent and so on, not working is not a choice.
Autonomy is not about having all free time all the time. It's about chosing how you want to spend your time (if that - like having kids - comes with restrictions, those are still your choice, since you opted to that).
Lack of autonomy is when you can't opt out - like when you don't want to have kids but your parents force you to an arranged marriage, or when you want to have kids but can't because you can't afford it, or when you want to spend time with your kids/family but need to work, and so on.
There is a school of thought that one’s purpose is not to do anything but live.
Where life contains both periods of happiness and despair. That both are important, though there are an infinite set of emotional positions to experience and that all of them are valuable, even if some are unsettling or uncomfortable.
I used to have preconceptions of not just achieving happiness as a purpose but which things specifically I needed to accomplish to be happy.
Several years ago a friend introduced me to philosophy offered by the mystic Sadguru.
Some of his work has had great influence on me. You may appreciate some of what he has to say: https://youtu.be/vQ7ZvPghdy8
the video summary made by lower middle class kids in india: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3909991784
That's basically it.
None of these will make you really rich. What makes you really rich is monopolising a market, overcharging and/or enforcing unfair terms, and farming the work/time/money/attention of others on an industrial scale.
Trading is small-time compared to that.
It feels so easy to be distracted with things and goals when the real meat of life is being present with people. I'm thinking about painting what I feel. Hang out with wife, spend a few hours on fitness, a few hours doing art, and maybe dicking around on the computer. No deadlines. No meaning. No hustle.
Or... what if I just started painting. I answered the question of what I would paint. I'd focus and paint dragons versus solo man in every day tasks. In some form, a form of solo therapy dealing with the internal hero journey that I have been on with my career.
The key mistake that I feel I have made is focusing on goals... the slaying of the dragon. But, what happens when you slay the dragon? find a bigger dragon? Keep going?
I've been haunted by the David Chou JRE ( https://youtu.be/j7T6__UbhBI?t=11323 ) in relation to Anthony Bourdain.
I'm doing the same thing. Except that I understand that I was able to do so because I'm considerably more resourceful than average.
I personally think that gives me the responsibility to at least improve the lives of a couple of people. Especially because it's relatively easy for me, compared to how hard most people have it on planet earth.
But if you just got the money from your parents or something, even that reasoning doesn't apply to you. Most people really don't add much more to history than hanging out and making sure their DNA is passed on to another generation. Nothing wrong with being one of them.
You might end up depressed due to boredom and lack of purpose, but that's easily fixable with antidepressants.
Tons of people by a $5 coffee or a $50 steak that they can't really afford (because they have credit card debt, because that way they don't save anything for retirement or an emergency, and so on).
Wealth ain't that.
I'm definitely not "rich" in the sense that I'd shrug paying those things off, but if I had to, I could pay it in cash tomorrow no problem. And frankly, I have to agree with his statement. It didn't buy me happiness, but it has bought me peace of mind. I never had to worry once about how I'm going to pay for stuff simply because I just worked and saved my money. I lived a very simple life and never felt a compulsive need to buy expensive and fancy things just because I had the money to do so. I've known way to many people who did that and were always dirt poor. Most of the time they couldn't even afford to fix essential things like a car to get them to their job.
>Joe Rogan isn't a great person to take any lessons from
If a republican says abortion wrong, should we discount their statement because they're republican? It's one thing to just listen to people and believe everything they say. It's another to comprehend when someone is just bullshitting and when someone is speaking from life experience. Joe in the early podcast was far less on the Ivory tower as he is today.
>At heart he's a comedian
Firstly, every single person who brings up his history prior to his mainstream success was he never did drugs, wired out of his mind to do better, and was very high strung. Universally all his friends on the podcast say this. It wasn't until he became a full on stoner that changed.
Also, he said his big breaks were from News Radio and then Fear Factor. Both of which were his steady income's well before he became a famous comedian. He was active as a comedian but he barely had any significant success at it until around Fear Factor. He even acknowledges that he got lucky. So he's not some moron that thinks he was entitled it. He said his whole life would've been different had he not gotten a job on news radio.
>I wonder how much he really had to deal with bills.
None in the context of my statement. All his money paying for his porsche, place to live, and lifestyle were from News Radio and Fear Factor. That's how he got famous and he has since been able to continue that success. His comedy didn't take off outside of Boston until well in his 30's.
Whoa! Let's not get into politics. ;)
You took my comment out of context. I'll take fault for not explaining myself.
Morgan Housel writes for the wide audience of people who might need info about how to handle finances. The target persona is probably someone who has high paying job. Joe Rogan went a path which is probably as far opposite of this you can get. I love the list though. MMA commentator with a company which has only recently been hitting it big. Among the earliest comedian podcasters, which was probably a long grind meant to get more bookings rather than make money directly and then the Fear Factor thing. Just seems like Joe Rogan doesn't really fit as the sort of person you would take something away from while also reading Morgan Housel.
> That's how he got famous
I'm a fan and I love stand-up comedy. The thing that's so cool about stand-up is that even when comics turn mega-stars, they still turn up unannounced at hole-in-the-wall clubs. When I call him a comedian, it's because once a comedian, always a comedian. And I say that with the greatest love.
If you're serious about comedy today, you're probably going to live on the road. If you aren't on the road, it's because you don't have the means or the bookings (or you're in a pandemic.) People on the road don't have much bills. The people at the top might, but if you're a young comedian, maybe you're living out of your car. Your bills come from the people controlling the pump you're getting your gas from.
Comedian must be the strangest existence. You sort of get into that mindset by not taking anything seriously, certainly not bills. Then at some point he got into Fear Factor and I imagine that bills were just a question of how large he wanted to live, not worrying about his electric getting cut off. Then he landed the Spotify gig and became a member of a super exclusive club of people who have signed a 100+ million dollar contract. When this dude says he doesn't have to worry about paying bills, he's on a way different level than most people posting here.
You literally just described a job. A huge portion of the US society makes money from doing things for one-off fees.
A sole proprietor house painter paints houses for one-off fees.
A car driver drives people around for one-off fees.
A motivational speaker talks to a group for one-off fees.
You likely have a stricter definition than the rest of society of what a job is, but you should update it so people know wtf you’re talking about. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/job
> People on the road don't have much bills. The people at the top might, but if you're a young comedian, maybe you're living out of your car. Your bills come from the people controlling the pump you're getting your gas from.
Your grasp on the expenses living on the road is very tenuous. Credit card bills for food/gas/(shelter|gym shower), monthly bills for phone/car insurance/tax payments/car payment/medical expenses, etc. You still very much have to manage finances like anyone else.
> You sort of get into that mindset by not taking anything seriously, certainly not bills.
No, that’s absolutely not how comedy works. Good comedians aren’t just people who don’t give a fuck. You think it’s just people spitting off the cuff but it requires persistence, preparation, and practice. People good at comedy take their craft very seriously.
You’re just describing a deadbeat, which has nothing to do with comedians.
Stand-up comedy is more of a craft than a job anyways. Most comedians never get out of the open-mic stage of the craft, and you don't get paid for those.
> Your grasp on the expenses living on the road is very tenuous. Credit card bills
We're assuming many of these people can even get credit cards. We're not talking about SV developers or people working on Wall Street. We're talking about people who put in a significant effort which they don't get paid for and then taking that act on the road for money which barely pays the gas and food to get them from one place to the next. A small number might be able get headliner gigs, which gets you to the point of viable as a living.
> No, that’s absolutely not how comedy works. Good comedians aren’t just people who don’t give a fuck.
What you quoted of mine was about how you get into the stand-up comedian mindset. I know how it works, you grind out stage time at open mics as you develop and fine-tune an act which you can take on the road. To get started on that path, takes a special sort of person. Doug Stanhope, the "comedian's comedian" said something which resonated with me. I'll see if I can find the exact quote, but he said he and his family took nothing seriously as they were growing up. Everything was a joke.
That doesn't mean that stand-up comedians can't make plans.
I have gone through frugal periods and embarrassingly not-frugal periods in my life. In the former, I could always afford to pay for what I needed, and that knowledge felt great.
The allure of ultra-wealth for me is not the prospect of a mansion, yacht, or household staff, but the knowledge that I could acquire those things if I wanted them.
I can't imagine ever owning a gaudy estate, of course. But what if I didn't have to care about house/land prices, and I could just buy or build whatever I thought was best for my family? What if I could go to a fancy organic grocery store and know that I could afford literally any grocery bill? What if I could cover my friend's $10k vet bill? What if I could sponsor research into homelessness prevention and addiction recovery? What if I could donate Linux computers and tech support services to local schools? What if I could start my own PAC to fund political candidates I believed in[^]? And so on.
[^]: consider that maybe nobody ought to have this power...
This did hit home, and hard.
However, buffer and lots of it, is the only preparation one can do for Black Swan events. I don't think keeping money that is sufficient to keep you happy is a healthy strategy in the long term.
Additionally, we need to bear in mind that we (humans) no longer live in our ancestral environment which we evolved for, and happiness as we experience it, is more often than not out-of-place.
But it's good to reassess once in a while, too. Maybe it's not worth all the other difficulty to hedge against this or that particular risk. Maybe you thought you needed it to be happy but you don't, etc.