autotelism and work
Autotelic : (of an activity or a creative work) having an end or purpose in itself.
Definition of Work:
Work is the set of things you have to do that you don’t want to do (@naval)
When you want to do something: that is not defined as work
Examples of work at the moment: Things that I don’t enjoy : paperwork, bureaucracy, being a glorified secretary
Things that don’t constitute work: learning about medicine, talking to patients, clerking, practical procedures
Play is the opposite of work
When I do things that don’t constitute work, it feels like play.
Examples of play : music, exercise, reading for curiosity, learning about medicine.
There is also an element of improving, getting better every day. This is rewarding.
The way to maximise satisfaction is to pursue mastery.
To pursue it for its own sake. Because you enjoy the process rather than any outcome. An autotelic process.
Keep in this mind when thinking about career. The correct response to life is to treat it like play.
to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realise it is play- Alan Watts
Minimise work
Minimise the set of things you don’t want to do.
But accept a level of jumping through hoops especially in a hierarchical field, and also when you are early in a career.
But as you get older, time becomes more valuable. You want to do work you enjoy. Work that is skill based, that you can improve on, that is congruent with your values and that you are good at.
Choosing work : heuristics
- Congruent with your values
- You are good at it
- It is skill-based, allowing for improvement
- Not far away - ideally you can walk in the sun to, or short drive
- You like the people
- Long term compounding
rules for money
There are no get rich quick schemes. Only sound financial habits compounded over decades
I’m writing this for reference for myself in the future.
This is not intended to be a catchall. Just a basic primer, and rules to think about wealth. A reminder to make sure I’m not making any huge mistakes.
Basics Rules
Keep a budget. You should know how much you are spending and where.
Spend less than you earn, but many don’t follow this because of rule number 1. You want to live below your means.
Insure against disaster. You have to mitigate against Black Swan events. Life Insurance, Critical Illness Insurance, Income Insurance, Home Insurance.
Clear Debt – Not relevant at the moment for me. I intend to keep it this way.
Have financial goals e.g. ‘Buy a flat in London’ or ‘Semi-retire at age 50 with a £3000 per month lifestyle’. The goals vary for individuals, families and at different stages of your life.
Invest Wisely - See below
Investing vs Saving
Savings : Keeping Money in ‘cash products’ in a liquid form. ’Less volatile’ . Savings is for short term financial goals. Likely to be used in the next 3-5 years
Investing : Putting Money into a place that accrues interest. ‘More volatile’ e.g. Stocks, Property, Gold, Vintage Wine, Pokemon Cards. Lots of things. Investing is for long term financial goals. 5-10-20-30+ years.
Why Invest
Money depreciates over time in the bank due to inflation. Inflation is where things you buy get more expensive over time. Therefore money loses its ‘purchasing power’
In 2018, the average inflation rate in UK was 2.5% If you left money in the bank, you technically lost 2.5% of its value.
This is why you should invest. You should also have money in savings accounts for short term goals. Do both.
Time in the market is a better predictor for returns
Start investing early with the intention to hold for the long term. Thanks to compound interest (8th wonder of the world), wealth accrues.
Become Wealthy through Owning Assets
You want to earn with your mind, rather than with your time (@naval)
It’s hard to get wealthy working a job. Because ultimately you are trading time for money. Being paid by the hour is not a recipe for wealth.
To get wealthy you need to own assets.
Assets allow you to earn while you are sleeping. The lever connecting input and output are disconnected. It’s not a 1:1 ratio either
Examples of Assets
- Owning/Renting out a house
- Owning/Investing in a business
- Owning Gold etc
- Investing in Stocks and Shares
So any money you earn whilst working a job, try to put that into assets rather than status boosting endeavours (e.g. super fancy clothes).
Not that status games are intrinsically bad. They are just zero sum and come with downsides. Wealth is a better game to play.
Diversify Assets
There are loads of asset classes you can invest in. I don’t intend to go into detail in this blog post.
But as a rule, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your assets
Don’t go all in. You want to aim to ‘not lose’ money.
Identify your risk tolerance
Depends on your financial goals and age. It’s individual. Make sure you are aware.
Conclusion : Long term thinking
Be a long term thinker. Be aware of behaviour biases (loss aversion, confirmation bias, hindsight bias)
Passive rather than active approach. Aim not to lose money.
Money won’t buy contentment or peace. That’s a different skillset. It will buy a degree of freedom though.
Remember money is a tool. Not an end in itself. You leverage the tool for experiences , for specific knowledge (hiring a plumber, gardener) and ultimately to trade for time, so you can gain a level of financial freedom.
intimacy and relationships
Relationships are critical
A TED talk done by Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, explored a 75 year old study on adult development, looking at factors that correlate with happiness and satisfaction in life.
The #1 factor was : Quality of Relationships
I want to explore how and why it is important to foster these and my current thinking on relationships.
My Experience
Friendships and relationships wax and wane. This is the nature of relationships. Circumstances change, close friends drift away, new friends take their place. At a certain age however, you meet people who will be there for the long term.
I think in your teenagers and 20’s, most relationships are based on proximity and based around activities.
As you grow older, these shift towards relationships based on support. As one settles down, harsh realities of life become more obvious. Death, Old-age, Sickness, Loneliness. The list goes on. The perennial truth : “Life is suffering”.
This is misinterpreted as a negative. But it is in fact just a reality. As some traditions have extolled, it is your reaction to these that determine your level of peace and contentment. It is possible to find joy. One way is through cultivation of close ties.
Why is it that relationships are so important?
Apart from offering support and help in times of inevitable crisis I think that relationships take you out of yourself.
The way I think about the arc of a life is that we are born selfish. As children and teenagers, we just take. As we grow older, we start to give back. To society, to parents, to loved ones. As you age, you keep giving away. To children, to your spouse. On your deathbed, you have literally given away everything. We go from selfish to selfless.
A lot of human misery, is based on self-rumination and thought. When one ceases to think about themselves, there is silence. There is a degree of peace. In unconditional love, one simply acts without any notion of self. This is a beautiful human experience.
How do you get to this place? How do we build close relationships?
Intimacy multiplied by Time
quality = intimacy * time
I think that the main factor in the strength of relationships is intimacy. The ability to be vulnerable and deeply honest about how one is feeling.
Like a maths nerd, I think about it via an equation.
The quality of relationships = intimacy compounded by time.
I find it hard to do this. Probably many people do. It is easy to build barriers, to distract oneself. It is much harder to look at how one is feeling and the most important relationship is ultimately with yourself.
I think the poet Rumi succinctly talks about how we can cultivate intimacy. It starts with examining yourself. To be deeply honest about the barriers one has constructed.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Rumi
Regret
Palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, recounts the regrets of the dying in her book.
At the end of a life, no-one ever regrets the amount of work they did.
What people regret is that they did not spend more time with people they love and admire. That words were left unsaid.
I realised this when I was a teenager. (I think I went through an existential crisis at 18). I made sure to spend time with family whenever because I knew that they wouldn’t be around forever.
Around the same time, A blog post by Tim Urban (Wait but Why) called the Tail End also made me realise the limited nature of time. By the time you are 18, you have technically spent 93% of your lifetime hours with your parents. You only have 7% left. You are in the tail end.
When you go through life, making decisions about how you want to spend your time. Prioritise relationships. Live near family and friends.
Part of the epidemic of loneliness and depression in first world countries I think relates to a degree of individualism and isolation. In the West, it is expected that one goes alone, makes a life, becomes wealthy, famous etc. You can live anywhere. Parents often want children gone, children want to leave parents. People constantly shift location for work. No roots are placed.
In the East, in places like India and Japan, the family unit is emphasised more (at least traditionally). There is a degree of ‘collectivism’. Everyone lives nearby, you have some level of roots established. The extended family is there. Even marriage is seen as the merger of two families rather than just two individuals. As a result you much lower rates of loneliness, atleast for now. Western culture seems to be displacing much of the traditional values in the East.
Romantic Relationships
It wouldn’t be a proper exploration, if I didn’t talk about this.
I want to explore how to think about dating and relationships. Mostly to clarify my thinking on the topic.
I read Aziz Ansari’s hilarious book : Modern Romance
It talks about the difficulties of dating and relationships in the modern day of Tinder and short term relationships. One view I’ve come to is that most relationships initially are based on attachment. There is the passionate love that comes through physical attraction. But research shows that mostly fades after a year or so. The relationship inevitably fizzles out as It doesn’t meet the Hollywood expectations of ‘everlasting love’.
Passionate ‘love’ (attachment) vs Companionate love
However over the course of a life, you have the development of a deeper more fulfilling bond : that researchers call Companionate love.
I think a lot of modern day ‘romance’ is just attachment. There is a transactional nature to it. I do this, therefore you must do this for me. Hollywood and popular media often glamorise ‘passionate love’. ‘Love’ has become an overused trite expression, a commodity to be bought through diamond rings and grand gestures. And when the reality doesn’t align with expectations, the relationship breaks up.
Companionate love on the other hand involves different skillsets. To unconditionally love. To support with no ‘tit for tat’ or transactional nature. You simply give without any expectation of return. It’s what the Greeks called ‘agape’ or the Buddhists call ‘metta’.
How do you go about finding a partner?
This is my own thinking on the topic. It will definitely change as I grow older. But fundamentally I think that the core values of the people should align, then all the small trivial stuff doesn’t matter (stolen from @naval)
Examples of core values : if they want a family, similar shared activities, opinion on education and learning, rational communication, non-dogmatism, curiosity, what the purpose of life is. There are many that are baked into your personality. Important to analyse them and look for people where the core values line up.
At a deep level, I think you’ll know when you find someone with similar core values. You just click.
I think there is an amount of luck to the whole process too. But you can increase chances by meeting more people. Go on more first dates. It’s an asymmetric risk-reward strategy. (re-reading this: wow that’s such a logical way to think about this, you robot).
Metric : Can you spend time alone
A myth portrayed by the media is that ‘you need someone to complete yourself’. Your other half.
This leads to huge problems to do with expectation.
A more healthy way is to work on yourself. Be comfortable being in solitude, alone with yourself. This is different from loneliness.
Once you can do this, then you can bring in another person with the intention to share a life rather than complete it. It should be two individuals rather than each a half of a whole.
Don’t Rush
I think who you choose to spend a life with is the most important decision you’ll make. For your future happiness, peace and direction.
Don’t rush. There are already too many unhappily married couples.
Conclusion
I’m sure I have more to say on this, but I can’t think of anything at the moment.
In terms of decision making for myself, a few salient points
Spend more time cultivating relationships Make sure you live near family and friends Try meet lots of new people, go on many first dates, look for core values aligning.