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June 17, 2020 - Davis Aurini
36:15
A Question of Lifestyle (Requested Video)

Originally uploaded February, 2017.

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Hey folks, so this requested video comes from Mina.
And it's a question of lifestyle, of how the hell are we supposed to win in a game with broken incentive structures?
It's the sort of question that normally you'd want to pose to Aaron Clary.
And I said as much to Mina.
Not only has that man made better financial decisions in his life than I have, he's worked as an investment specialist for a good portion of his life.
So if you want career advice, he's really the guy to go to.
But Mina clarified and said that I'm asking more from the philosophical, the strategic type of perspective.
And so I'm going to do the best damn job I can with this question.
And the question is really, I think it's one that all of us are asking ourselves.
Because we get sent down rabbit trails.
We get told to do the wrong bloody things, you know, like, oh, go get a line of credit so you can buy a leather sofa, for example.
Go get a useless degree.
Here's some free money to do it.
You name it.
So the real question, I think, is what the hell are we supposed to be doing with ourselves?
You know, especially in the system being as messed up as it is, what the hell ought we to be doing with ourselves, with our lives?
And so with that in mind, I'm going to break this video down into three portions.
Number one, I'm going to examine the hidden assumptions in the question itself, because if you can understand what your assumptions are, where your question's coming from, that tells you a lot about the question.
That tells you a lot about what your answer is going to be.
Number two, I want to go over some basic rules of thumb, some pieces of advice that I wish I had followed a little bit more stringently.
And number three will be addressing the one part of the question where he says, what are good milestones for where we should be in our lives at certain ages?
What should our goals be in the strategic sense rather than the particular unique sense for you, the individual?
So with that said, I'm going to start by reading the question because it's a great question, and I think it sums up where, well, just about where all of us are trying to figure out what the hell we're doing with ourselves.
So here's the question.
To what extent do you encourage chasing the money insofar as it provides financial independence?
In our consumerist hedonistic culture, even more reason, is that even more reason to pursue financial independence in order to get out of the rat race altogether?
Or is it a standalone goal that one should have regardless of his station or current life trajectory?
Well, a seemingly random question I ask because, as you and others have noted over the years, institutions in general and employers in particular have become, and perhaps are becoming even more, anti-mail to the extent that a man can lose his paycheck overnight to something silly that wouldn't matter to any reasonable person.
Isn't this even more reason to build oneself up as soon as possible to get the fuck out?
Going even further, isn't being financially independent a way to protect, to the extent possible, one's free speech.
Touching on Rouche's keen insights, too many are silenced or even self-censored out of fear of backlash or losing their jobs.
And when push comes to shove, they lack the resources to protect their interests and speak the truth.
These are all probably leading questions.
I ultimately believe that you agree.
So I was wondering more specifically what recommendations you have.
If you had to stipulate, what arbitrary milestones would you establish for certain age brackets?
Like if you're 25 and just finally got off debt, that's good, but so on and so forth.
In answering these questions, how would you touch on certain subtopics such as active versus passive investing, home ownership versus renting, lifestyle inflation, among others?
Finally, what metric, if any, can one use to say, okay, I've won, I can quit playing this game now.
In short, what do you, as a man living in 2017, do to build and protect your financial interests?
So it's a broad question, as you can see, which is why I want to start off by examining the hidden assumptions in that question.
So the first one I want to touch on is free speech in the workplace.
Now, you're probably thinking of Brendan, it was Brendan Ike, right?
The guy behind Mozilla.
He's currently doing Brave, the web browser.
And he lost his position despite an extensive career because it was exposed that he supported gay marriage.
You know, he donated $1,000 to the Prop 69 or whatever the heck it was.
See, I think this is the wrong sort of question.
What happened to him was fluke of nature.
It was random chance.
It was the whims of fortune.
Okay, he was not mouthing off publicly about that.
He got along with everybody.
It was a bunch of nasty people decided to target him and try and get him to lose his job because of some unconnected, like the whole SJW phenomenon had nothing to do with him.
He just donated $1,000.
That was it.
And he came into the crosshairs.
So for you, for all of you, for all of us, that's the wrong question to be asking.
There will be outrageous slings and stones from the whims of fortune.
You can't control fortune.
You don't really know what the future is going to hold in store for you.
And if you become a convenient scapegoat for some political cause, well, you couldn't see that coming.
Now, the free speech thing, you are of a particular nature.
And that nature is going to be suited to a particular industry.
And if you are a mouthy son of a bitch like I am, then corporate jobs really aren't a good fit for you.
However, other jobs are.
You know, certainly I've enjoyed working in warehouses, which isn't exactly your dream job working in a warehouse.
But in a warehouse, nobody gives a shit what your opinions are.
They give a shit whether you can do the job.
And I really appreciate that environment.
Similarly, military is going to be a little bit more, well, it depends on what level.
Some of it's going to be more political, some of it's going to be more practical.
It's not really a question of freedom of speech because any job you're going to get, you're going to need to get along with your coworkers.
And mouthing off about politics is not going to help your relationships with your co-workers.
The problem, I think, that you're getting at there, the real issue, is that if you are dependent upon your employer for employment...
then you better do whatever the hell they tell you to do and better agree with everything that they say.
So, what we're really talking about is not so much freedom of speech, it's about being able to write your own ticket.
And there's a lot of ways you can do that.
If you are a professional engineer, you know, a professional engineer with experience, you can write your own ticket.
If you're an electrician, you can write your own ticket, or a welder, or a programmer.
Because Brendan, was it Eichmann or Ike?
I think it's Eichmann.
Again, you know, he got fired from Mozilla.
And what did he do?
He went and started up his own damn company.
And more and more, I think that anybody that's even remotely independently minded is going to want to pursue that route of being able to write your own ticket.
You are ultimately, like, on the one hand, this economy is moving more and more towards corporate takeover of absolutely everything.
You know, even convenience stores now are all 7-Elevens for crying out loud, you know, versus the professionals that really know what they're doing and do it wherever the hell they want to do it.
You don't see these people.
They don't have logos all over the place.
They don't have billboards because they're out doing what they want to do.
And if they're looking for a welder, they're looking for a welder up in the oil patch and you know how to weld, they don't care what your political opinions are so long as you don't start fist fights with coworkers.
So I think that more and more, those of us that are independently minded, those that like to think for ourselves, there's no longer a middle ground.
Okay, there used to be like huge megacorp and the smaller companies where as long as you were polite, it was okay.
And then the crazy entrepreneurs that would, you know, run their own businesses and either everything goes or only what they say goes.
It's all conglomerated into the big megacorp.
And so the trick really is to find the way that you can write your own ticket, that you can be job independent, corporation independent.
You might work for the corporation, but you're not going to do it for too long.
You're going to go work for another one.
And it's the quality of your work that sells you as a person.
So that's number one.
Number two, are workplaces becoming anti-male?
Now, yes and no.
And I'm being nitpicky targeting this one.
But let's keep in mind that the workplaces are just equally anti-female.
Let's not play it into some big victim scheme.
What they want, they want obedient employees that don't ask questions and just go along to get along and do whatever idiotic thing that they can get away with.
And they want women because women, especially women that are massively in debt, that have been provided with fancy outfits and free lunches from the corporate boyfriend, and women that have a Tinder account, so they've got a sideline on male attention.
They make very slavish employees.
But you can't exactly say that the corporations are pro-woman.
They're anti-human is what they are.
They're anti-masculine.
They're anti-feminine.
They want effeminacy out of both sexes.
It's effeminate men and effeminate women who are pretending to be men instead of being actual good quality women.
It's the Mean Girls Club writ large, where only the lowest quality women dominate and the lowest quality men who act like low quality women.
So keep that in mind.
This is opposed to everybody, the system that we're developing right now.
It's a system of ego and pretense and shallowness and venality, you name it.
Pull out the thesaurus.
It's just an ugly, ugly system that we have that promotes the worst of human characteristics for, in theory, for profit, except it's not even doing a very good job of that now, is it?
Okay, now here are the big critiques to your question.
Financial independence and quitting the game.
What is financial independence?
Seriously.
I mean, my folks are retired, but they do not have a traditional retirement.
All of their money is tied up in ongoing projects that they are currently working on that require work, that require ongoing investment, and do seem to be paying off.
I'm not privy to all the details, obviously, but what is financial independence?
Because I think this is a pipe dream.
This is the dream of the lottery.
Okay, the idea is, oh, if I just won the lottery, then all of my problems would be solved.
Except that's very seldom the case.
Generally speaking, when somebody wins the lottery, two years later, they are broke and they are now alienated from all their friends and family.
And if you look at people that collect trust funds, collecting a trust fund is one of the hardest things to do.
Thankfully, most of the people that get trust funds have been groomed into it, and you probably don't know who they are.
Yeah, they're rich New Yorker social.
Well, actually, you do, because you're from New York.
But they're rich New Yorker socialites who devote their time to training classical music, to reading, to writing, to doing something to contribute, because otherwise they would just go on a Coke binge.
Financial independence ain't all it's cracked up to be.
In fact, trying to figure out something to do with yourself when you're financially independent is the hardest goddamn thing in the world, especially if you're not trained for it.
And most people just fall into Absolute depravity and nihilism whenever they do so.
It sounds like a wonderful dream, especially when you're struggling with your bills.
And hell, I feel the same dream too.
Oh, if I could only win the lottery, buy a $2 scratch ticket, why not?
But if that actually happened, it would make you absolutely miserable.
You need something to do with yourself.
You need something to do all day.
You need a game to play.
You don't want to get out of the game.
You want to be playing the game on your own terms.
And see, if your aim is financial independence, you're going to be looking at the wrong things.
You're going to be looking at, okay, how do I get my mortgage paid off as quickly as I can?
How do I get debt to debt?
And, all right, next thing you know, you have no student loans, your mortgage is paid off, you have 10 years of food expenses saved up in the bank, and now you're staying in a house in a city you don't like, and you spent 10 years not hanging out with people that you like, but working your ass off, and you've got a bunch of food paid for, but like, what the hell are you doing with yourself?
And actually, to quote Aaron Clary again, I think one of the things he's pointed out is, you know, he, in his opinion, he worked too hard.
He worked too hard to stay out of debt when he should have been partying a little bit more.
What you are seeking out is an interesting and fun way to live your life.
And part of that interesting part, the part of the fun is what you're doing to make money.
And so if you spend 10, 15 years of your life just trying to become financially independent, okay, now you have a whole bunch of money and no friends or no life and no purpose anymore.
Like you slaved away doing a job you really, really hated.
And okay, you're financially independent, you quit the job, you're never going to do the job again.
Now what?
Now keep in mind, that's the extreme example right there.
That's a ridiculously extreme example.
Because generally speaking, what you are going to make money at is, yes, it's tedious.
Yes, like any actual work in real life.
Unlike video games, real work is going to have the tedious component to it.
But the tediousness, the to diety is part of what makes it interesting.
And so whatever you wind up doing to make money, you are going to have something about it that you like.
You know, maybe you start off as a day trader.
That's what you do to make money.
And you don't really like doing that.
It's a very high stress environment.
It's very, my uncle does that.
It's absolutely crazy.
He's not a day trader, but he does currencies.
Absolutely insane.
So maybe you do that for five, ten years.
And then you're like, okay, now I've got all my shit sorted out.
You move on to something that's related, that's informed by it, but not quite the same thing.
So don't try and get out of the game.
Don't try and become financially independent.
What you want to do is find a life that gives you value.
If you like working on cars, then I don't know, buy a classic car that you absolutely love and maintain it.
Buy a whole garage full of them and maintain all of them.
If you don't like working on cars, find a job where you can afford newer cars or you can afford a mechanic to fix them.
You're not looking for an end goal.
You know, like some people it's been said that a lot of brides out there, they're always thinking about their wedding and not the marriage.
Don't think about, oh, now I've achieved financial independence.
Then what?
No, no, think about what do you want out of life?
How do you want to add value?
How do you want to spend your days?
And, you know, chilling on the beach with margaritas is fun for a week.
By the second week, you start to get sick of it.
By the third week, you're ready to off yourself.
You need to be doing something every day.
You need to figure out what that is and make sure it's something that conforms to the sort of life that you want to be living.
So that's my breakdown of the question itself.
The false premises hidden there.
Next.
Oh, and so yeah, when do you quit the game?
You never quit the game.
You quit the game when you're dead.
Next, all right.
Three pieces of advice that I wish I'd listened to a little bit more.
Number one, and this is the biggest one, is figure out the money and everything else falls into place.
Money does not make you happy, but poverty makes you miserable.
Always, always, especially when you're young, focus on the bottom line.
Okay, don't risk everything on a huge gamble.
Make sure you've got the bottom line taken care of.
Make sure that you've got the basic finances taken care of.
You know, make sure that you can afford to go out to the bar on Friday night or go rock climbing somewhere.
You know, that you're not, your buddy invites you to go rock climbing and you're driving there terrified that your car is going to break down.
So that'll be a $500 repair job and you won't be able to show up to work on Monday.
No, no.
Sort out the money.
Nail down the basics.
Keep your ass covered.
That's number one.
And once you've done that, well, at that point, you can figure the rest out.
Just make sure you keep the difference between necessary expenses and optional expenses.
Because, you know, you mentioned lifestyle inflation.
This is what happens.
You know, people have the car nailed down.
Instead of just driving the damn car, they go and buy a BMW.
You know, or instead of going, you know, having the car nailed down, going out on Friday nights, oh, they're going out on Friday nights and doing two grand worth of blow or something stupid like that.
And so suddenly they can't differentiate between the stuff I need to do and the stuff I want to do.
They start treating the stuff they want to do like the stuff they need to do.
Oh, well, I need to go spend two grand on blow because that's what all my friends are doing.
Keep those two separate.
You know what?
Two grand for a car, that's something you gotta pay.
Like it or you gotta pay it.
If you don't, you're catching the bus.
Two grand for blow because your friends are doing it.
Well, do you really need to do that or can you take a week off?
So keep those two things in perspective: the necessary necessary shit that you need to be on top of and the stuff that it's optional.
Next is dexterity beats strength nine times out of ten.
If you invest 10 years of your life becoming the absolute world expert at whatever it might be, how many industries is that applicable across?
Now, if you're the world expert at marketing, okay, you know, you can find a job anywhere.
But if you're the, for example, the world expert at the history of the Roman matron between 80 and 100 AD, that's a very unique field of specialization.
Similarly, if you sign up for the corporation and you slave away becoming an expert on their proprietary corporate software, and then 10 years later, the corporation goes out of business or they just decide they don't like you, now you're in a bad state.
Yeah, I mentioned this when I was discussing civilization: you need competence in multiple categories.
You need to know a little bit of sales.
You need to know a little bit of engineering, a little bit of auto repair, a little bit of computer repair, computer software management.
You need to know a little bit about everything.
You need basic competence across multiple fields.
And pick one field to be an expert in.
Don't sacrifice the rest of them so you can be an expert in one.
You know, most of the guys that you see living in million-dollar houses, most of them, they might have excellence in one field.
Okay, but they're useless at everything else.
They pay a mechanic to fix their car, they pay a plumber to fix their house, you name it.
They are only good at that one narrow field.
They have no generalist capacity whatsoever.
And those people have a very high turnover rate.
Because when they go broke, they go hard broke.
Whereas if you have generalized competence at many things, it all synergizes, it all complements one another.
So be good at many things.
Don't focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others.
Unless if, again, if you're that rare Mozart, that rare mathematical genius, that you can actually justify it.
And keep in mind, for every one of those guys that succeeds, you have 99 more that have an IQ of 180 and wind up being a bouncer for a living.
And ultimately, really the biggest thing, last piece of advice, is figure out where you fit into the world.
Don't pursue the wrong dreams.
Don't pursue financial independence for the sake of financial independence.
Don't pursue Hollywood for the sake of being popular.
Figure out where you fit in to the world.
Like I said earlier, if you're really mouthy and opinionated, then a corporation is definitely a bad place for you.
Maybe you should be on YouTube.
But figure out where that is.
Figure out where you feel good, where you work with people of a similar disposition.
Figure out where that is.
Because that right there is way more important than achieving some sort of social status signalling.
Like the skin you're in.
Figure out what you like, what you're good at, what you can contribute to, where you can be around people you like.
Go after that.
So it comes to the again, whims of fortune.
If you pursue the impossible, you might achieve it, or you might, you know, be another, your wings might melt off and you'll fall into the ocean.
So do you want to do that or do you want to be a glider?
Do you want to live life and really experience life and enjoy life?
Or do you want to achieve somebody else's definition of greatness?
Pursue your own damn definition.
And so to finish off, some benchmarks of where you should be in life.
By the age of 25, you should be competent.
You should be on top of your shit.
You should have all your shit together in one place.
You can put it all into a bag.
You should have your driver's license.
You should have a plan for paying off your debts.
Like, presume most guys at 25 have been to school, you're in debt.
Okay, but have a plan for how I'm going to pay those off.
You don't have an idea of what the hell your career direction is.
It's like, okay, I've done this, this, this, this is what I'm going to do with myself now.
25, you should have your shit together.
You should be basically competent at everything you're expected to do.
If you show up for a job, you know, and the boss says, hey, can you do this?
You can say, yes, I can do that, but that other thing I'll need training at, but I can definitely do that.
Have your shit together.
Be reliable by the age of 25.
No more screwing around.
Okay, no more fucking off like you did when you were a teenager.
You're 25, have your shit together.
By the time you're 30, you should have your shit together and you should have a plan.
Maybe this is a mortgage by 30.
If you've figured out a city that you like living in and you've got a good sense of where the government's going, if taxes are going to go up or down, you should have a mortgage.
You should have six months of expenses saved up.
Fuck you, money.
So if you get sick of your present employer, just flipping the burden, you walk off because you've got six months of bills saved up.
You're not dependent upon them.
At 30, you should have some experience.
You should know what you are competent at and what you're worth, and you should be able to walk away from anything.
And by 35, you should be diversified.
You should know what you're good at.
You should have backup plans.
And you should have fallback positions on top of that.
So again, if mortgage is part of it, if you decide that you do want to buy a house, by 35, you've got the house pretty well, you know, it's partly paid off.
You're established there.
You know your neighbors.
You're not worried about it.
You should have other options.
You should have been networking.
You should know different people, different industries.
You should have figured out how, oh, well, I've been doing this form of work.
That could easily transfer over to this.
So even if your entire industry gets shipped overseas or God knows what, you know how to take that and transfer it on to something else.
By 35, you should be thinking strategically.
Let's put it this way.
25 should be the corporal.
You should know what the hell you're doing.
30, you should be the sergeant.
That you've got such a good grip on things, you're preparing for things that are even going to go sideways, even though you're not expecting them to go sideways.
And by 35, you ought to be getting up there to Sergeant Major, where you are ready for every different type of way things can go sideways, and you're on top of it.
You're unflappable.
If things turn to the worst, well, you deal with it because you had those backup plans in place.
So, brother, I hope that answered your question.
You want financial advice, go ask Clary.
But life is very, very unpredictable.
It can seem predictable for a very long time, and then it's very unpredictable.
We don't know what the winds of fate have in store for us.
And we have to, simultaneously, we need to plan and prepare for the future while also living today to the best ability that we can.
You need to be doing both at once.
You need to be living a life that's meaningful.
You don't want to spend 30 years, you know, making all your money and then you retire and then you say, like, wait, what the hell am I going to do with myself now?
You don't want to spend 10 years doing that.
don't you know maybe you need to spend five but no more than five and you know what if If you have the chance, you should really try and get outside of your environment.
You know, New York City is a weird place.
Visit some other places.
Go live in other places if you can.
Get to know people in other places.
If you have an opportunity to go do your job somewhere far away and weird, go do that.
Get that experience.
See how other people live their lives.
See what all the opportunities out there are like.
So you have some perspective.
Even if you decide to stay where you're at, yet you still got some perspective on how it is somewhere else.
Just try and live the most meaningful life you can, ultimately.
Get your shit together, but live each day for itself.
Thank you very much for the request.
Hope you guys enjoyed the response.
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