Escaping Hyperconsumerism

I was born subservient to aggressive and abusive advertising, which pre-defined my life desires for me.

This is a short story about how I set myself free.

Knowledge is Everything

There are 3 books that really helped me understand industrial society 🏭 and its long term trends:

The Intelligent Investor [1st ed] (Ben Graham)
The Art of Money Getting (P.T. Barnum)
Poor Charlie's Almanac (Charlie Munger)

The focus of all 3 books 📚, which I highly recommend reading, is to:

Reduce your expenses 💸 to minimum.
Earn money 💰 doing something valuable, which can be done, by making your knowledge 🧠 invaluable.
Invest that money in opportunities with predictable return 📈.
Invest in capital 🤖 to reduce your labor.
Avoid (-) interest, as it's a force of usury.

Avoid Usury

Advertising tells you to buy things using predatory credit but don’t listen!

Go thrive instead 💚.

This graph represents +/- 3% interest on $1 over 100 years:

At 50 years, we have $4.4, which can be [m]e^{+x}[/m] 📈 or [m]e^{-x}[/m] 📉 and your world possibilities diverge based on the sign of this exponent.

Debt is indenture, unless paid with cash flow not tied to your labor exertion. If you are indentured, it’s hard to make long term plans.

Human societies historically forgave debts every 7 or so years with jubilee 🎉 but this stopped happening after influential churches ⛪️ became for-profit enterprises.

Nondeterminism > Avarice

If you were to use labor to pay off a big loan, it could finance a very deterministic life and you can know reasonably well, what life will be like 10 years from now.

But is that rational?

Beyond a certain point, when you have enough money to pay your necessities for a whole year or more, the absolute risk of non-deterministic games is bounded, but reward is still unbounded 🤔.

This is why it is not rational to collect money for the sole purpose of collecting money.

Instead, you can go explore!

Labor can be Recursive

It's possible to use work you've done in the past to accelerate work that you do now.

You can use software libraries 💻, art drawings 🎨, music clips 🎵, or other work you have done in the past to accelerate your ability to do stuff now.

You can also use open source work that other people have given you consent to use, in the same way.

With labor recursion 🔃, return on labor is >1:1, and labor accrues [m]e^{+x}[/m] interest just like capital.

Recursion lets you stand on the shoulders of giants, and your own shoulders too!

Health is Wealth

If you avoid predatory credit, you can live life maximizing creativity, health and well being, instead of being indentured to things TV said was cool.

I coded a financial calculator 👩‍💻 to help you figure out how to maximize your ability to thrive as a human, but it only accounts for cash flow and debts, no interest yet:

https://aperture.science/life_calculator/ .