When applying yourself to build your fortune, you need to consider how much you need to be rich according to the measurements of your individual life.
How expensive is your ordinary life?
How expensive are your vacations/sabbaticals?
How long could you possibly live?
What is the maximum amount of money you could possibly spend in your remaining years?
How much money do you need to make if you intend to be frugal to the point of obsession with optimized finance?
How much money do you need to make if you intend to abuse your finances to the greatest extent possible?
There are finite values for all these questions.
There is a finite amount of money in the world.
The argument “It will never be enough” is a philosophy of the poor to ease the suffering involved with being poor. If you accept this philosophy, then you reject Capitalism. However, this philosophy is flawed, as it implies that chasing after money is an endless race, when there are finite values to the matter. It only works out logically if there is an infinite amount of money to be made.
Some research says that, at least in America, $70k-$80k per year is the point at which one person crosses the line between what can make them happy, and living in excess where extra money becomes redundant and without relevant meaning.
If you have more money than you can feasibly use, it becomes another problem to solve. You start to feel like you should be working on elevating the fortunes of others, which quickly builds your ego into some kind of savior within a broken system. This is one of the evils of money. You can be enslaved by a lack of money, and by an excess of money.
One aspect of identifying as wealthy is escaping the slavery of money, and this requires Philosophy.
Understand the Game of Money to find the sweet spot where the Shackles of Slavery do not exist. Freedom is hidden, and only found by the Wise. Operate in the world blindly, and you will be enslaved from more directions than you can count, both from the Objective and Subjective Worlds.
Human Society is full of Traps because Humanity has a Love Affair with Games. Humanity is a Social System with many Layers, and the Chains of Slavery are greater in quantity and length than all the Roads and Power Lines in the World, combined. Everything pulls on everything else, in a massive web, and this was true long before Computers, Telephone Poles, or even Paved Roads and Vehicles.
An expense of Freedom is detachment from the World. The less chains you are bound by, the more isolated you become. There are limits to how many chains you can remove before you feel the Negative Effects of Freedom.
We are Social Animals, and isolation dehumanizes us. We aren’t Human without each other. Some research suggests that you are the combination of the 5 people you socialize with most. If you socialize with nobody, you will suffer from becoming lesser of a human being as a result.
Freedom is good, but all things in Moderation. There is pain to be had from having too little freedom or too much.
That’s why the sweet spot gained by the Wise is not simply a removal of all chains. Perfect Freedom and Excessive Freedom are not the same. Freedom is about mobility within a System, and a System is built out of Interactive Limits.
Building a better Financial Situation is related to the dynamic of Future-Proofing your Technology. If you build a Computer that is in excess of any program you could possibly run on it, it is just like making sure your Income is great enough to easily absorb the damages from Inflation.
Take Eggs for example. There is an upper limit on how much the price of Eggs can increase before owning your own Chicken Farm becomes less expensive than buying Eggs at the Supermarket, and that’s including the hands-off approach of hiring Employees to run it for you.
This illustrates how one can gain freedom by applying one’s own chains into the System. If you have to deal with chains no matter what you do, it is better to accept the dynamic of chains and build your own collection of chains with which to yoke the world to behave the way you want it to. This is where School empowers you, in that “Knowledge is Power.” Power is your push-back on the forces of the world, in participation. You can adjust for comfort with power, which is leverage. It is easy to see School as a System of Slavery when you don’t see the value of the chains. You are not being enslaved, but empowered. It is a matter of one’s mindset.
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