The Highest Forms of Wealth

What is trying to be expressed by &quot;highest form of wealth&quot; is usually about agency.<p>The problem with agency, unlike what &#x27;power&#x27; connotes you to believe; you can&#x27;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 <i>possess</i>, but only through <i>becoming</i> a required thing through transformation; examples are health, skillfulness, being understood in a relationship, an equanimous existence etc. Even then, you&#x27;re to an extent up to the whims of misfortune and fortune, or if you&#x27;re not allergic to that word; to fate. There is at least one thing you can&#x27;t be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality; which connects to the original meaning of fate.<p>But that&#x27;s not even the only problem with agency; most of the time you don&#x27;t even know when you have it and also when you don&#x27;t have it. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapy; you either misattribute blame where it doesn&#x27;t belong or fail to hold people&#x2F;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&#x27;t work.<p>Which means agency, capability of doing things that get you towards your <i>real</i> goals, whether you&#x27;ve realized them or not, is deeply tied to <i>wisdom</i>; knowing in which manner you&#x27;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.<p>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.

The highest form of wealth is health. Working eyes, working ears, working arms, legs that move when you want them and where you want them. An uninterrupted night of sleep because you aren&#x27;t in pain. Count your blessings every morning.

It’s noteworthy that relationships are entirely left out of this article.

Trying to come up with some static perfect state in which I would be happiest has been an incredibly slippery problem for me. Even agency itself can become exhausting as anyone who has worked for themselves and gone back to the (temporary) relief of a manager assigning a fixed set of tasks will come to realize. Even if I had endless wealth and time which would solve 90% of my problems I would still have to struggle to find new meaningful challenges. This is not to despair of ever finding happiness just to remind myself its (for me, I don’t want to project my phsychology on the whole world) more a process and to enjoy the present with the knowledge that “this too shall pass”.

Odd resident for the HN front page, but if you could take just 5 authors with you, then Morgan Housel might be one is them. Well, unless you have already achieved the sorts of fuck you money he talks about in this article. I would still appreciate his wisdom though. It&#x27;s Sunday, maybe you have some time, just open up a Google search and marathon read everything this person writes.

He left out the level of wealth where you fly to the edge of outer space on a penis-rocket.

I&#x27;m thinking about retiring early. I have a reasonable nest-egg, and I realize that I worked too hard for the first half of my life. What if I minimize what I do for the later half. Is it wrong to sit on a couch and enjoy the presence of my wife while watching shitty TV? Is it really that bad? Play computer games with my friends?<p>It feels so easy to be distracted with things and goals when the real meat of life is being present with people. I&#x27;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.

Wealth is being able to go to a restaurant, look at the items on the menu, and worry more about calories than cost.

Source of happiness: Being able to just say no to any job since I could live quite well without one until 2040.

Wealth is when you feel free in your head. When feel comfortable with your doings. And when you are surrounded by good people. I know how it is to have a very good income. It makes life very pleasant the first years, but you get used to it. And money can and to some degree in my case destroy a lot of things. For example exchanging a family for a new girl. Partying with the richest and forgetting your old friends. The trick is to stay conversative and don&#x27;t fall for the cool VIP life.

<i>Desiring money beyond what you need to be happy is just an accounting hobby.</i><p>This did hit home, and hard.<p>However, buffer and lots of it, is the only preparation one can do for Black Swan events. I don&#x27;t think keeping money that is sufficient to keep you happy is a healthy strategy in the long term.<p>Additionally, we need to bear in mind that we (humans) no longer live in our ancestral environment which we evolved for, and <i>happiness</i> as we experience it, is more often than not out-of-place.

The intellectual honesty one hits hard. A luxury indeed!

Freedom of inconvenience is what I view ultra wealth and power to grant.

<i>Money is coined liberty</i> - Fyodor Dostoevsky

We&#x27;re really taking about happiness here aren&#x27;t we?

This is the highest rated (by me) article today that I read

Enough with the Morgan Housel spam.