[872] Opportunity Cost

I should sleep. I want to sleep. There’s apparently too much on my mind.

I went on a work ride-along this Monday. The girl I was with said she paid for college selling pirated TV shows and movies to the Christian college kids who weren’t allowed to indulge in modern media. Stories like this, beyond being hilarious, highlight this dirty little fact and “secret” to success. It’s almost an accident. Why couldn’t I make thousands of dollars selling pirated material? Lack of initiative? Lack of sheltered youths? Or is there something deeper going on?

She’s not in the pirated media business anymore, obviously. It was making her considerably more money than she is making now. I suspect many of us can think of one or two similar opportunities in our own lives to make more money. At what cost? She enjoys helping people in her social worker role. Granting kids access to media is not the same thing as helping someone navigate how to get food.

I’ve recently written a detailed description offering parts of my land up for rent. 14 people have saved the listing. It’s been shared 5 times. I need 1 person with a little money or know-how to get the often lauded, poorly understood, “passive income.” Intuitively, I think people know what I’m after more than the money. Spiritually, I think it’s all-but lost on our psyche and culture at large. Do I want rent? No, I want enough money to free up my mind to watch TV, read, and play music. I want to be free from the obligation to constantly be busy instead of exploratory. That’s easy to understand.

The cause and effect mechanisms for participating in society are broken. The only thing you can rely on is your screen. The words pop up as you wrote them. The show streams when you click. Your paycheck isn’t going to match your time and effort. Your friends aren’t going to fit the romance. Your hobbies have morphed into coping strategies because you can’t afford therapy or medicine. You also try not to think about how you wouldn’t need therapy or medicine were you plugged into something that more holistically accounted for you and what it meant to be alive.

I have a pretty consistent habit of saying how “beyond” or “absolutely” dejected or angry I might be at something, right before proceeding to do it. The displeasure has to be voiced. The option to deny any obligation has to be entertained, accepted, and realized as an absolutely free-to-make choice before I capitulate without clenching or headaches. My mind is constantly doing the math and weighing the psychological impact. Do I have an overwhelming desire to quit? No. I didn’t even at DCS, I had to to protect myself.

So goes it with the land. I’m not rushing headlong into completing the little projects because nothing is weighing on it. I’ve “won” those battles. What’s the next most important thing? I’ve given myself a small list of things to do in “retirement,” but for the time being, I need a consistent source of income that more than keeps my head above water. I need to be a wage-slave. I need to pretend, excuse me, “be professional,” as though how I’m going about my time is indicative of my best behavior or ideas.

That sucks, has always sucked, and will suck into the future. Meanwhile, I hear stories about making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from my neighbor who has been a trucker since he was 14. “I don’t know where it went, but I made it.” Money is ambivalent about whose possession it is in and whether it was spent on guns or food. Money as an extension of ambivalent power means you’re simply at the mercy of its influence. You’re not entitled to it. We use phrases like “earn” when it comes to money. We beg. We negotiate away our morals and sense of dignity.

I absolutely want to “level up,” and be the kind of old guy I heard bellowing for the desk attendant at the hotel today. I want to roll up in my expensive camper and truck, be decked out in rich old-guy pseudo camper gear, and make my voice known. It’s a cliche and entitled place, but I bet he also has really good healthcare.

Mostly, I don’t see enough of the spirit I’m after. Even the people I thought had it the most are kind of falling off my radar. I don’t wish to return to some “feeling like a kid again” with a fervor for doing in spite of the direction it’s taking. But I do want the memory that has pushed me this far to remain a hot one. It still matters. The problems are the same. The experiments are still interesting. The obligation is still there. No amount of money by itself is going to buy what your life means to you or the kind of relationships you wish to form.

One thing I absolutely have to stop doing is playing the debt game. I chose a living room over financial peace of mind. My credit for the first time ever said “excellent” having read that I paid the card off. It’s by no means insurmountable, even in the next month or two, but it’s debt. It’s letting the bad team in the game we’re at the mercy of take extra shots.

I don’t know what the mix of “all of my time in a job” plus “the benefits and freedom of hustling” looks like. I really want to know. I don’t want my days off to look like times to sleep and escape. I don’t want to think about how dark it is by the time I get home each night. Maybe in a couple months I’ll have renters, a massive series of paychecks from comfortably covering everyone’s missing hours, and this dopey boring sentiment that was preventing me from sleeping will be one of the most glossed-over entries when future archaeologists dig up my blog.

[763] Unwritten Rest

One of my favorite free things to do is play with my Personal Capital finance management page. When I think I've spent some exorbitant amount on something I shouldn't have, I expand the dates and track the context. That expensive meal? About $5 a day on average. Wasting money on a gym membership I rarely go to? Less than .05% of all my expenses over the last 2 years. $23,000 towards rent and the big catch-all label “home maintenance” over the same period? Money I'll never have to spend again once I'm done.

 

I like to remind myself as often as I can how luxurious a life I lead no matter how hard I've worked or what I aspire to in the future. I didn't work myself to death in my 20s, and I think it speaks to why I had someone recently guess I could be 24 after I shaved. But now my thoughts are shifting into the kind of mind space I might be able to inhabit. I've craved that kind of security to “not have to think” about things. I wanna know if everything burns down, I've got insurance. I want to know that “retirement” will be a kind of choice and not desperate negotiation. I want to be the friend or family member who has that “secret” ability to swoop in and remind everyone that we have it better than the majority of the planet.

 

More than any degree of further personal gratification though, I want to go back to world building. I want to be able to have the freedom I had in college to cultivate environments and projects that I can plug people into. I want to compel by my increased access and expression verses being a desperate pitch-man walking a delicate tightrope about implausible futures. I want the freedom to fail, and I've materially already paid for that freedom at this point. That means, a driveway will be needed, but it's not a requirement to survive. I can paint and beautify my house, but it's not like I envision judgmental house guests particularly soon.

 

I talk pretty flippantly about how “long” it took to get to this point. I act like I didn't get an enormous amount of free time and experiences with things in the intervening years. For better or worse, I still enjoy knowing a little bit about everything. That's a luxury and hobby I've been able to engage in basically nonstop. I've more playthings and distractions than most would ever engage with in life, let alone by the time they were 30. I feel I've got a hard-enough fought middle ground environment that lets me appreciate what I have while not being naive about the power and difference money makes to your disposition and prospects.

 

This is a thing that irks me about watching YouTube videos trying to compare and contrast opinions on haves verses have-nots. The poor person inevitably takes solace in some personal characteristic of theirs or sense of family that “would never change” no matter the amount of money they had. The rich person makes some wholly unaware comment about how frugal they are in not buying something like a drink after arriving at Chipotle in their $100K car. I see a sense of denial and ignorance in both mindsets that I hope to avoid as I start to express myself differently as a result of my hopeful freedom.

 

They say money exacerbates you. I feel in recent years I've been brought to a relative heel, but I could see me slipping into some form of arbitrary nouveau hood-riche dilettante. I have something of a humanitarian-esc spirit and would find it great to create something that was sustainable and genuinely helped “things” and “people,” but on the same token, I've become several degrees more removed from my feelings of believing in what I can change, how, and the indefinable impact any one person's perception of it may be. One can remain skeptical if this is my attempt to run away from what will arguably be my increased responsibility to “the bigger things,” or if I actually feel that way and won't give a damn after I get mine and my circle is taken care of.

 

That was a big motivator in thinking there was any intention to reach beyond. “My circle.” Who's in that? Me and Byron routinely joke about how we can't seem to work together on a shared goal and mostly glean tag-along benefits from our individuated lives. My dad's in my circle. I stopped being so gushing in my “all of my facebook friends are the REAL MVPs” nonsense. How much do I want to contribute freely towards instead of seek to employ or exploit? My sense is it's a fairly smaller ring than the past. Keep the supply of goodwill low to increase the demand, like any emotionally manipulative parent. Because isn't that my angle? I've had enough middle-aged women inquire about my prospects for having children, implying my fatherly quality I assume. Will my fatalism regarding relationships usher me into the kind of surrogacy Byron maintains over his charges?

 

The fact that this specific change has happened so “slow” is not a testament that everything needs to be that way. That's the thread I'd hate to lose which I consider an important part of my personality. I still want things fast and to happen over-night, no matter how physically trained I've had to condition my body to not meltdown over them not doing so. I want the “empire” tomorrow, even if it takes next year. I want my experimental businesses to be branches off of every paycheck that would have otherwise went towards rent or car maintenance. I want to hang out tomorrow, not in six months after my floor is insulated and I can flush my toilet. The walls continue to come down. The “excuses” for as valuable and reasonable as they are, will be gone. And once every one of mine are missing, I'll be coming after yours.

[416] Unhappy with Your Riches

I think I’m going to change my tune a little bit and say that I am indeed searching for something. Often people tell me they hope I can find whatever it is. The idea of looking for something hasn’t really sat right with me. The things people tended to associate happiness with once they were “found” always seemed like something of a lie or short-sided. When I think about what I’m looking for, it basically sucks to think about because I can’t really give it to myself.

It’s one thing to desire a kind of job, for example. It’s very tangible and there are often guidelines you can follow that assure you you’ll get there. My “inevitability” idea that practice plus time tends to equal a polished version of what you were practicing makes a goal in that vein feel incomplete. There are certainly a lot of really cool jobs that take a lot of study and expertise. People make plenty of claims about the happiness and fulfillment they get from working on what they’re passionate about. That’s fine, but it doesn’t really sit right with me in our current climate.

Let’s quickly move through a few ideas I’ve already talked in detail about. I’m interested in too many things. More to the point, I’m interested in what ties them all together. I describe this as being concerned with culture. On top of leaning towards a “big picture,” I feel little to no, or very particular, motivation to “prove something” as it were. I don’t have significant financial obligations, very many people I respect who expect anything out of me, and have worked myself to literal exhaustion and nearly passing out in previous projects.

But how does one go about expressing their interest in “everything?” How do you look for it and is it even possible to define or find?

I think it easiest to describe how I envision the process by starting with something small. Let’s take gun violence. It’s important to note, I even relate to it as “small” deliberately. It kills about as many people as influenza and pneumonia a year, but you’ll never see as many images of people coughing as you will memorials and photos of dead black kids. If you’re awake, you’ll have noticed presumably every possible angle you could engage with the topic.

Whether you start discussing police training, America’s general “gun culture,” not-so-passive racism about poor people’s accountability and sensibilities, the ease of access, the various kinds of weapons, the state of mental health care, militarization of police…the list goes on.

What bugs me is that I think I see something that supersedes the mess of “national conversation” that manifests as pointed ignorance in comment sections and “news” sounding chambers. Rarely, if ever, does the mass preponderance of conversation center around economies. Rarely, if ever, does a conversation revolve around the environment or reasons that stem beyond a very, what I consider small-minded, idea of culpability.

So I want to be an economist, psychologist, or sociologist? No.

I see a general “bad philosophy” from certainly a ton of people, but from my window of the U.S. I’d want to be someone who could address that. I want numbers to drive an ethos and not in the way we worship money. This can go wrong like Bill Gates responding to education numbers or right like Bill Gates responding to the number of people who die from malaria. I think his driving ethic remains “more noble” than your average rich person who doesn’t need to know anything more about charter schools or vaccines than the numbers they’ll return on a quarterly earnings report.

Take Elon Musk in how he talks, and why he’s in business. I think “he” needs to be national policy. Where’s the department for making sure more people like him exist? Or, how do you get people to recognize and appreciate what he’s doing? Creating and investing for the future because it’s right and just and profits come second. He’s acting in good faith towards the whole of humanity.

So I want to be in promotions or marketing? Perhaps ambassador to the world of lefty moral elites? No.

My first, and kind of last, idea I’ve managed to have to be like Musk is to go into business for myself. It feels like I need to create an engine. Here we can use an appropriate car analogy. If you think of big car manufactures, your grandparents might be prompted to say they built “just fine” engines that got you around, are immortalized in certain models, and spoke to the industrial backbone that made America dominate. The actual history and consequences of that engine are less than ideal.

We built an economy around combustion and fossil fuels. I could build my engine in all sorts of ways. I could exploit pyramid structure themes. I could work 22 hours a day in any number of jobs. I could leverage myself monetarily and through enthusiasm and smooth talk bolster my numbers and research. I could dye myself in the wool of endless sacrifice and scrape together some machine that you’ll presume, as it took so long and much effort to get, is fundamentally worth taking pride in and bound to work.

I say this because of firsthand knowledge and accounts of what people say as you’re accomplishing things. They say them regardless of how you feel about what you’re doing or how you get there. It’s not always mere politeness. They’re reflecting the simple themes their culture has imbued. Whether it’s the almost spiritual righteousness of achieving in business or their uplifting faith in your temerity, it’s not a conversation of tempered expectations.

So this leaves me with an overt concern with all the pieces and circumstances that create my engine. To think how often you hear “war is good because it fueled our mission to the moon!” I find this horrifying, and not because it’s speaking truthfully about the circumstances of the era.

What I want to create takes a lot of moving parts. And learning directly the amount of things you need to create and run a coffee shop and delivery van, let alone build a framework to struggle with “culture,” is humbling and sobering to say the least. In a way, culture is the run-off of dominating power. And if most business power comes from operating in the shadows or manipulating politics, now the problem seems even more complicated.

But, what if you manage to find a way to wage one angle of your battle in the realm of ideas? My diminished hopes for the reach and capacity of language notwithstanding. What if you catalyze people to think like you or approach problems in a way that depersonalizes it? Make them realize they’re after the same sorts of things you are and that maybe their depression, anger, or hopelessness is conditioned. What needs to be created in the mind before you start playing in the real world?

Because that’s going to be the driving force. That sense, you can build to last. Whether it’s a charismatic leader who bleeds into every level of a company or a group of individuals who feed each other’s motivation and creativity, there are places you can “take the temperature” of culture. The scatter-brained nature of social media will always be “the struggle” more than the pulse.

So, I’m looking for more people “like me.” When I need money, or, significantly more than someone in my economic circumstances can expect, I do everything from drug studies to yard work to save up and experiment in business. The long-term planner and humility in me recognizes this as inefficient and something of a mockery of how I desire to operate. I do things “now.” I pick up the phone, or resolve the problem or read as much as my eyes can take about something in order to move to the next step. Employing that habit “alone” is not getting me where I want to be. I’m not culture, and dislike the thought of being on some kind of self-satisfied island complaining about or ignoring the parts I see as problems.

It pains me to think that in order to find the kind of enthusiasm and free time required is the purview of college. Unfortunately, much of the enthusiasm came from naivety and hedged betting. And my forays into employing from that pool are proving fruitless and stressful as well. If I picked, literally anything, I could find people with open arms and endless thoughts they’d love to share. Because I want something big and abstract and hard, it’s fundamentally alienating; even discussing it prone to ridicule, let alone confusion. I can’t expect to change knee-jerk reactionaries when I have no counter-culture to introduce them to. And I can only take so much solace in knowing I’m not actually alone as long as we’re failing to even discuss ways beyond our circumstances.