Winter Reflections [3]
The Final 20,000 Days
More than once, when asked: “Do you enjoy your work?” I had no immediate answer. Over time, the thinking around this question clarifies in the form of a thought experiment.
The Continuum of Final Days
These “Winter Reflections” were largely inspired by recent conversations with Oliver at our “reunion”. The last time (also the first time) we met was 6 years ago, here in Helsinki — we talked about startups and self-actualisation. One night that very week, I walked past the bright glass exteriors of an Apple store in Hamburg before the calm, midnight-blue Binnenalster reflecting scenic lights. There were flowers and candles in front of the store. Steve Jobs had just died.
Then, do you remember not long before his death, a gaunt-looking Jobs appeared before the Cupertino Council to advance the “Mothership” campus development? There were also reports that he was still working with Apple leadership on strategic plans, up till the final weeks.
My thoughts were: it must be a really good job position that he got himself in, because it was still something worthwhile, even with just a few months to live. If we plan for the future with the (unstated) assumption that we’ll live forever, there won’t be any compelling urgency to change a “bearable” path.
The thought experiment is to move along a continuum: if one has only 1 year left to live, what’s the plan? What’s the strategy for 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? The question becomes less and less hypothetical. At some point, it’s no longer radical at all, it becomes very reasonable (in a micromort-counting actuarial sense) — more reasonable than assuming infinite years. So if you had 20 years left to live, what would you do differently?
Richer Than Enough
Oliver mentioned he just interviewed a candidate for a job, at the end there was a few minutes left, so he asked: “If you had $10M and didn’t have to work, what would you do?” The candidate got stuck and could not come up with an answer. In the Bay Area, people often talk about “FU money”, a threshold of savings (from exits) after which you can “do whatever you want”. (Is this what motivates many to pursue a startup career?)
But what does it mean in materialised forms to “do whatever you want”? We’re not talking about being a benevolent dictator and creating your own “Minecraft Kingdom on Earth” — that’s too rare to assess. Are we talking about nicer hotel rooms or better seats for air travel? Those are already within the reach of Bay Area engineers, albeit occasionally.
I supposed the original phrasing indicates the concept is more about a sense of freedom: not having to be tied to a vocation or livelihood. Similar discussions also bring up terms like “financially secure” or “financially independent”. An annuity (a life-term fixed income stream purchased with a lump sum) calculator would say $2.5M buys you the effective replacement of an engineer’s income. But do I really need that?
Freedom is a lot easier to achieve when you’re accustomed to modest (though not at all austere) living. I have enough savings to live much better than an impoverished PhD candidate for many years without working, that’s already achieved — there is a threshold of some “life-changing amount” of money, but it’s not reachable by unleveraged accumulation of savings — between these two points, increments in savings will not materially improve my lifestyle.
Will “retirement” still make sense as a financial concept for younger generations? (I put $0 into 401K because I don’t think “retirement” will still be relevant by the time it unlocks). In 10 or 20 short years, we may well have past the point of so-called “technological singularity”, beyond which the future is unpredictable. Australia might have introduced a Basic Income; autonomous vehicles would make housing more affordable; we’ll have “burgers from trees off the dining room wall”, 3D-printed new livers, and conversational AI that can teach you art, science, and philosophy.
The expected marginal utility of an incremental amount of adding to the savings is approaching its trivial limit… There’s enough to live modest and free, while patiently waiting for the future to arrive. In any case, even if it doesn’t work out, I can always land new employment, I can always move into my parents’ basement (figuratively speaking). Basement creates sufficiency.
Lebenskunst
On Quora, if you browse through topics on housing, earnings, and living in the Bay Area, you get a picture of the mounting unhappiness. It seems workers (even software engineers) spend years in shitholes like SF (filled with social strife and over-the-top attitudes) or LA (filled with highways and parking lots), toiling away in fluorescent-lit cubicles, trading life for some delayed (supposedly to be realised) enjoyment.
No consumer value is created when one accumulates savings. The value is created when one spends, in exchange for goods and services and essentially well-being and quality of life. At some point, the fear of not getting a chance to spend the savings and eventually “live” became far greater than the incentive to accumulate an incremental amount of non-life-changing savings.
Now I have a lot of latitude and space of the mind to think about the urban environment, about quality of life…what does it mean to live more, to “be active, to live, to have the courage to taste the thrill of being young” (somehow the English translation added a lot more nuance), how does one live so as to make it worthwhile — these questions are no easy tasks either, in fact it’s much harder.
If you can live comfortably for 5 to 10 years without working — what should you do with those 5 or 10 years? It is a question that has been made familiar and prominent for me since primary school: how does one approach life choices so as to live with no regret “…чтобы не было мучительно больно за бесцельно прожитые годы, чтобы не жег позор за подленькое и мелочное прошлое…”
“One must spend his life so as not to end up with the agony of regret over wasted years and the hellish shame of a petty and abysmal existence.”
It’s a hard and worthwhile question.
