For the middle class, money is not distinguishable from the instrumental recipes they have learned to make it. You crank this handle 40 hours a week, paychecks come out the other end. It’s mostly financial apathy punctuated by the occasional acute anxiety attack.
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These anxiety attacks are solved with some mix of formal institutional debt, one-off hacks, and the occasional windfall. Where the poor stay beholden you friends and family in webs they often hate, the middle class gets beholden to institutions via scripted, ceremonialized debt.
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But for those able to transcend the instrumental view of money, it becomes possible to make way more than dictated by your anxiety levels. This means setting up money-spinning engines that break the effort-reward correlation characteristic of middle-class money-making recipes.
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This is not “passive income” so much as “live money.”
I’m pretty bad at it. Most of my income is tied to effort-reward recipes. It’s not as deterministic as paychecks, but it’s still instrumental recipes not engines. Maybe 5% is from the engines at most.
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New goal is to increase that 5% to maybe 15-20%. True leisure time is only created in correlation to live money. No matter how leveraged, effort correlated recipe money, dead money, can’t spin off true leisure.
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Live money/dead money is basically like live player/dead player.
It’s only live money if you can buy you Monday morning leisure time. Dead money effort recipes can only buy you evening-and-weekend leisure time. Cognitively speaking, the dregs of attention.
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And it’s only leisure activity if nothing critical or financially anxiety-provoking is riding on the outcome. If you make money off it, it’s true “free money” in psychological accounting. Free money is of course even better than live money. It’s more than live. It’s living free.
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Live-and-free money is not earned with intention and instrumental effort (dead money) or collected as a rent (live but not free money). It’s the best money because it’s a genuine surplus from freely undertaken leisure behaviors. It’s the money you’ll feel happiest spending.
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Replying to
enough dead money relative to cost of living is functionally the same as live money, and the number could be a lot lower than most people think (FIRE)
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Sorry, no it’s not. The whole FIRE crowd is doing what Bruce Sterling calls “acting dead”. Doing a radical cost-down of lifestyle and paying a significant social cost is not actual freedom, it’s degeneration.
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Your description may be accurate in some cases but definitely isn’t universal wrt FIRE. For some (like me) it’s not about self denial but accurately calibrating what actually brings happiness and gaining freedom from wanting the (many) things that don’t.
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