The Nothingness of Money - More to That⁠↗

So herein lies the Great Tension: Money is a required pursuit for life, but a pointless pursuit upon death.

The core idea of retirement is this: You frontload your attention spent on money to generate wealth. You then offload your wealth to spend your attention on leisure, purpose, or love. Retirement is our clever way of extending the Nothingness of Money out while we are healthy enough to appreciate it. We work hard in our youth so that we don’t have to when we’re older. We no longer have to be on a deathbed to fade money out of our thoughts, as we can do that with decades left to spare.

Habit is the glue that gives perception its stickiness. If you spend 15+ years logging your expenses every night, checking your portfolio twenty times a day, and making decisions based on their fiscal impact, how plausible is it that you will stop thinking about money after you’ve reached your goalpost? If you’ve been treating money like the ultimate collectors’ item for decades, can you stop identifying with that collection once you’ve accumulated enough? Even if you do retire early, the Nothingness of Money won’t begin its descent if your habits continue onward. If you’re still checking your portfolio every time you touch your phone, you are far from understanding the pointlessness of money. If you hesitate to invest in a better diet because of the fiscal cost, you are still held hostage by the almighty dollar.

The only way to resolve this tension is to remind yourself that you are already aware of the inevitable futility of a money-centered pursuit. That what you will see as ridiculous later can actually be perceived as ridiculous now. For example, if a friend told you that he wanted “I outperformed the S&P 500” on his tombstone, your immediate reaction would be to laugh. There is no way you’d take it as anything other than a joke. The key is to take that exact feeling and remind yourself of it whenever money hijacks your attention. That when you’re fixated on its pursuit, you can break the spell by understanding how laughable it is to be remembered for it. That in the end, it will have very little to say about the person you are. By doing this regularly, you can punctuate the spikes of attention with moments of clarity, which helps to bring the heightened plateau down to a more reasonable level.