Live Below Your Means for Freedom

Any other big things you should avoid other than renting out your time?

Yeah, there are two tweets that I put out that are related. So the first one is talking about queer or something like how your lifestyle, you know, has to upgrade. It shouldn't get upgraded too fast. That one basically said, "People who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles just can't fathom."

I think that's very important, like just to not upgrade your lifestyle all the time to maintain your freedom. It just gives you a freedom of operation. You basically, once you make a little bit of money, you still want to be living like your old self, so that worry goes away.

So, don't want to upgrade that house, lifestyle, and all that stuff. Let's say you're gonna pay the thousand dollars an hour. The problem is that when you go into a work lifestyle like that, you don't just suddenly go from making twenty dollars an hour to making a thousand dollars an hour. That's a progression over a long career.

And as that happens, one subtle problem is that you upgrade your lifestyle as you make more and more money. That upgrading of the lifestyle kind of ups what you consider to be wealth, and you stay in this wage slave trap.

So, I forget who said it; maybe it was Nothing Too Late, but he said, "You know, the most dangerous things are heroin and a monthly salary." Right? Because they're highly addictive.

The way you want to get wealthy is you want to be poor and working and working and working. This is, for example, how the tech industry works. Well, you don’t make any money for ten years, and then suddenly in year 11, you might have a giant payday.

Which is, by the way, one reason why these very high marginal tax rates for the so-called wealthy are flawed. Because the highest risk-taking, most creative professions, you literally lose money for a decade of your life while you take massive risk and you bleed and bleed and bleed.

Then, suddenly in year 11 or year 15, you might have one single big payday. But then, of course, Uncle Sam shows up and basically says, "Hey, you know what? You just made a lot of money this year; therefore, you're rich, therefore you're evil, and you got to hand it all over to us."

So, it just destroys those kinds of creative, risk-taking professions. But ideally, you want to make your money in discrete lumps separated over long periods of time so that your own lifestyle does not have a chance to adapt quickly.

Then you can basically say, "Okay, now I'm done, now I'm retired, now I'm free." I'm still gonna work because you gotta do with your life, but I'm gonna work on only the things that I want, when I want, and it's gonna be much more creative expression and much less about money.