The Good Life

What is “the good life”? See these interesting definitions.

I like aspects of each of them, but the concepts I want to explore are buying back time and learning for learning’s sake, namely, financial independence for leisure and intrinsic motivation for pleasure, and the questions I want to ask are what if money was no object and how would you really enjoy spending your life?

What Makes a Life Good?

While I avoid excess luxury and materialism in my frugality and minimalism, and wouldn’t consider myself a committed hedonist, I’m partial to Christian Hedonism and Epicureanism for their intrinsic and mental aspects.

While I don’t think people can live in a completely moral way—perhaps with the exception of Jesus of Nazareth—I’m partial to a way of living that is increasingly virtuous, satisfying, and worthwhile (e.g. Stoicism, self-improvement, and Protopianism). And while I don’t think that complete self-sufficiency and living off the land are necessary, I’m partial to simple living and rejecting excess consumerism (e.g. ERE, MMM).

Buying Back Time

What is financial freedom, and why is it the cat’s pajamas? You can read more about it here, but in a nutshell, it’s when income and sustainable withdrawals from investments are enough to cover expenses, i.e., you don’t need active income from a job. A common starting guideline is a portfolio worth about 25 times your annual spending, corresponding to an initial 4% annual withdrawal.

How have I been able to get most of the way there from ages 19-29 on low-income jobs? Besides my natural thriftiness, debt-free status, homespun fitness program (esp. bicycling and weightlifting habits), and special housing arrangements, I was able to boost the process with the IWT system of optimizing my credit card (paying it off in full every month), beating the banks (avoiding predatory fees, optimizing interest, and negotiating), investing (target-date/lifecycle index funds), conscious spending (prioritizing), saving while sleeping (automating my system) and avoiding most financial “experts” (esp. commission based and non-fiduciary).

The bottom line is: get started early, keep it simple, focus on the long term, know your rich life, and live outside the spreadsheet. Personally, I recommend considering a Roth IRA at quality institutions like Vanguard and contributing monthly toward the annual maximum.

A lot of this has to do with the Instant Gratification Monkey and the Rational Decision-Maker. The former has no plan for the future; the latter does. Like in the marshmallow test, it’s an experiment that illustrates the challenge of delayed gratification.

Money and Happiness

Speaking of money and eudaemonia, i.e., happiness, or beatitudo, i.e., joy, what’s money’s real value (subscriber-only article), should personal finance/economics be taught more in school (subscriber-only article), and should one avoid wealth as a substitute for higher/deeper things?

I like to start with Mr. Money Mustache’s philosophy of happiness: spending less and owning fewer possessions can create more financial freedom, a more satisfying life, and a smaller environmental footprint.

Or as Marcus Aurelius said, “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

And as Jack Ryan wisely said, “The secret is to get yourself a really good S&P 500 index fund.” Personally, I prefer the simplicity and big win of a low-cost target-date index fund that automagically shifts from aggressive stocks to conservative bonds over time for most passive/lazy Homo sapiens like myself because it takes advantage of our natural psychology.

Yes, I think it should be taught more in schools—not in a dry and boring way but in a way that sparks curiosity—and yes, like Aquinas, I think one should avoid wealth as one of the four typical substitutes for true spiritual fulfillment.

Doing Things for Their Own Sake

And finally, what’s intrinsic motivation, and why is it arguably better than extrinsic motivation? What the former is: Doing an activity for its own sake, driven by internal enjoyment, curiosity, or interest. What the latter is: Doing an activity to earn a reward (money, grades, praise) or to avoid a punishment.

Although the “do something” principle of action preceding motivation is important, motivation can be a natural byproduct of pursuing meaningful goals, and external incentives are powerful in the short term, intrinsic motivation is better as an end in itself, especially when not conflated with short-term whims, immediate gratification, and impulsive pleasure.

Perhaps this is a Christian expression of it, in a modern rendering attributed to St. Clement of Alexandria. The exact translation remains unverified, but its emphasis on doing good through love rather than fear or reward is reflected in his Stromata, Book VII:

“The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward. The perfect person does good through love. His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does. He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward. The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God.”

A related ethical ideal—rather than a definition of intrinsic motivation—is treating people as ends in themselves. In Kantian deontological ethics, this is expressed in Immanuel’s famous Formula of Humanity (part of the categorical imperative):

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

As an interesting side note, classical utilitarianism is fundamentally about pleasure, but as J. S. Mill qualifies like the Epicureans, not all pleasures are equal: there are higher pleasures (intellectual, artistic, and moral pursuits) and lower pleasures (basic physical or animalistic drives).

Or in the words of Kurzgesagt’s labor of love (a task done for pleasure, not reward), the goal is to create content that “wouldn’t be dry or boring, but left the viewer inspired and wanting to dig deeper”. I share Kurzgesagt’s stated vision of a “science-based, humanist and optimistic worldview,” and find a similar spirit in Wait But Why. I also share Kurzgesagt’s mission to make these ideas appealing by being objective yet aesthetic. Academia and white papers tend to emphasize the former in dry formalism, but with the creative freedom and personal playfulness of a blog, I have room to combine the rigor of the former with the more fun and accessible style of the latter.

A Life of Learning

Overall, I think financial independence buys back time in a short life, freeing one from mandatory and often, monotonous work (e.g. the soul-crushing drudgery of white-collar corporate work or the excessive bureaucracy and paperwork of the military).

In my case, it also liberates me like the liberal arts, i.e., liberal, as distinct from servile or mechanical (i.e. involving manual labor) and originally referring to arts and sciences considered ‘worthy of a free man’; later the word related to general intellectual development rather than vocational training.

That enkuklios paideia ‘all-round education’ and being an interdisciplinary generalist/Renaissance man (a person with many talents or areas of knowledge) is my passion project, and being a man of leisure (a man who does not need to earn a living) lets me fashion for myself an informal career as a man of letters (a male scholar or author) by following my vocation/calling/interests like Moses when the burning bush glimmered and caught his attention off the beaten path.

Jordan Peterson argues that we do not pick what genuinely interests us; rather, interest and curiosity pick us. What’s picked you, and if it’s mainly objective truth and the self-correcting scientific process to get there like me, how do you avoid motivated reasoning along the way?