As you age, revenues and costs of life both go up. Amounts that seem life-changing at 18-22 seem like they'd barely cause a ripple at 40
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Just got email abt a $3k student scholarship from org I belonged to 13y ago. 3k summer thing=life changer at 19. Would take 300k for me now
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Your life inertia can be measured by the amount of money it would take now to steer it as decisively as 3k could, sophomore summer year.
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My life inertia has increased by 100x. This is why being rich is useful and the idea that "happiness doesn't increase beyond 72k" is BS
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If you're already happy, TCO of life might stabilize at 72k, but if you need to *steer* you need more in proportion to inertia
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Of course you could argue that with creativity, you can steer as much with 100k as with 300k or 3mm, but creativity isn't easy to increase
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(Carol Dweck/growth mindset notwithstanding, you can't mindset-change your way trivially to doing 300k moves with 30k)
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I wrote about this life inertia thing from a different angle: lifestyle rigidity (as in wage rigidity) a while back
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Still don't have good ideas about how to mitigate increasing lifestyle rigidity with age (esp with debt), but it's a big challenge for many
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The good news: as your life gets more complex, it also becomes weirdly sensitive to being massively steered by serendipitous minor events.
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So youth is generally high-leverage+ deterministic. You can consciously steer 90 deg with 3k. But it's also too simple to enjoy serendipity.
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In middle age, deterministic steering is more expensive by like 100x, but if you're open to it, complexity buys serendipitous steers cheaply
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