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“I don’t suppose you’d find it up to the standards of your outings. More conversation and somewhat less petty theft and getting hit with pool cues.” – Firefly
It’s important to have standards – like licking and sticking standards. Stick to your guns!
I was watching Tony Robbins™ over a year ago while working out at the gym. I like to watch videos when I do the cardio machines – it seems to make the time pass more quickly. I’m not sure that’s a good idea since (at least subjectively) that makes my life shorter. Perhaps I should fill my underwear with sand before I get on the treadmill – that might make it seem a little lot longer. But I digress. Going from memory, Robbins® was talking about if you wanted to change your life, you had to raise your standards.
You’ve changed your life for the better if you’ve raised your standards and changed your behavior in such a manner that you are moving to meet those standards. If you change your standards of, say, your new pants size? And your new standard is a 32” waist (451 meters)? Great idea! But you don’t change your daily habit of 86 Krispy Kreme® delicious glazed donuts? What has your new awesome changed standard given you?
Nothing.
Wait, worse than nothing.
Frustration. Which leads to death. Okay, after decades. But it still leads to death.
With all apologies to Mr. Robbins® (the host body) and the symbiotes/parasites that are his amazingly immaculate hair (no actual human has hair like that, so I expect that his hair is a separate living entity, perhaps responsible in some psychic way for his charisma), changing standards without changing actions just breeds a sense of impotence, anger, discontent, and, when present in relationships? Divorce or an end to friendship.
High Standards + Poor Execution = Sadder Than Johnny Depp’s Bank Account
Let me give an example:
Let’s say I have a standard that includes having a spotless bathroom. One where you could eat chateaubriand off the tiles (and had an Alexa® speaker that told you what chateaubriand was) with the Queen and she’d be excited to come back for dessert. A bathroom where the towels were laundered by angels in heaven with unicorn blood as the soap. I mean a really clean bathroom. Really clean.
Okay. I now have this standard. Cool.
But I hate cleaning, and I’m not really good at it.
So my standard is a really clean bathroom. But The Mrs. has to clean it.
Sadly, The Mrs. is neither an indentured servant nor someone who is easily cowed. Did you think I’d marry a weasel-woman? Nah, could have had dozens of those. I need a woman with fire in her eyes!
But if I expect The Mrs. to clean the bathroom to my “dinner with the Queen” standard? Never going to happen. And the result?
I’d be angry at The Mrs., for something she never promised nor intended to do. If this continued through other aspects of our relationship?
We wouldn’t have a relationship.
And I understand that. If we expect more than the other can or will give? We don’t have a relationship. But some standards really are important. How can you tell which ones?
When it comes to standards:
What standards are you willing to fight for? Real fighting, not Twitter® or online petitions.
What standards do you actually control? If you don’t control it, how will it happen?
What is the consequence of the standard not being met? If nothing, then . . . what?
Focus on standards with consequences that have meaning to you. That you control.
You do control your pants size. Are you willing to fight for it? Does it have consequences?
The questions above really do have consequences: if you spend your life being upset about things you don’t control, and that you can’t change, and that don’t impact your life?
Even the stupid dead Romans had this one figured out:
“Today I escaped anxiety. No! I discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside of me.” — Marcus Aurelius (stupid dead Roman)
What kind of spreadsheet? A crystal ball spreadsheet, one that predicts the future, all the way until 2081 when the ice sheets have melted and the dinosaurs have returned. I’ve maintained this spreadsheet since 2014 or so, and it’s been very accurate for predicting my net worth over the course of four years. I used it to decide (once upon a time) whether or not to quit one job and move to another. Spoiler:  I didn’t move jobs.
The real reason I didn’t change jobs was fairly simple: the spreadsheet told me that within three years I would have enough money that if I decided to chuck it all and get a job as say, a school teacher for a few years, I could continue to live the dissolute lifestyle awash in PEZ®, long essays, and regret to which I had become accustomed with no changes. But there is a faction that sees a more radical idea: just retire early. They even have an acronym for it: FIRE – Financially Independent, Retiring Early.
One of the biggest advocates of that is still Mr. Money Mustache. MMM as he is affectionately known to his “Mustachians†retired several years ago, and has been blogging about it since. His blog is exceptionally popular (LINK). One secret of MMM is that he, by choice, has created a lifestyle of voluntary low-spending, i.e., he’s cheap. By cheap? His family has only one car, which they rarely use. Mainly he uses a bicycle to go where he needs to go.
This is a fascinating idea. You gain financial independence not by having the biggest pile of cash, but by having the smallest pile of needs.
For example:
I have a stack of books that is literally over 12 feet (143 meters) tall of books that I’m planning to read. They’re stacked up by my bedside. They’re stacked up on a bookcase near the bathroom. They’re stacked up on my dresser. And I get several new ones every month to replace the ones I finish reading. And this doesn’t account for my library, which houses a collection of thousands of titles on every subject from tanning a hide to hiding a tan. When we moved from Alaska to Texas, the movers set a company record for number of boxes packed in one day AND amount of weight packed in one day. Reason? Books.
Mr. Money Mustache would (probably) say: “Why are you spending money on books? There’s a library not two miles from your house that has a decent collection, and if they don’t have the book you want they can get it through interlibrary loan. You could even get your fat butt on your bike and go down there to get a book and lose some weight in the process.â€
He’s just that kind of party-pooper, but that would also impact my love of gadgets and gizmos that, ultimately, aren’t worth the time and money that I spend on them . . . except the drone, which is really, really cool. Everyone needs a drone, right?
But let’s look at the major categories of spending and consider them through the soup-stained Mustachian paradigm. Each of these topics could be a blog post by itself (and some have) but we’ll skim them today:
Mortgage:Â
Don’t have one. You probably have more house than you need, which causes you to spend more on heating and cooling than you would need to if you had a house of human proportion. Pay it off so you’re not paying interest to a bank and can keep the money yourself. But you still have to pay taxes and I’d still suggest you have insurance on the place, since it protects you in several different ways, especially from certain lawsuits that could dig deeply into your cash.
Home Location:Â
Why live in an area that causes you to have to spend a lot of money? Why live in an area (if you’re still working) that causes you to drive lots of miles to a job, which eats up both money in commuting cost and your life in drive time? I know! Location!
This was an awesome location. Wonder why we sold it? Oh, yeah, piles of money.
When I was a kid and the phone rang, I’d jump off the couch, and run to the receiver to pick it up. It was an event! Now, in a day where communication follows you to every crevice of your life, when the phone rings, we rarely even pick it up unless the phone announces that it’s Grandma. Wondering why we even have one . . . oh, yeah. Grandma. And the phone is free with the Internet.
Food:Â
Food is big business. And an even bigger scandal. How much food do we buy that we end up never eating? Since we have teenage boys in the house, the answer is “very little.â€Â It’s been my saying (for forever) that the most expensive food that you buy is food that you don’t eat.
The second-most expensive? Restaurant food, especially fast food. I can buy three pounds of delicious ribeye steak for about $30. Dinner for our family at Taco Bell™ (remember that we have teenagers) costs about $40. Full disclosure, I account for a chunk of that $40 myself, but steak is so much better than a Nachos Bell Grande®. And I can buy six pounds of ribeye for $60. And we can eat for several meals on that, versus one trip to a nice restaurant, which would cost about $120-$180, including tip. I maintain that I can eat better food more cheaply if I prepare it at home myself. And by myself, I mean (except for grilling) The Mrs. And as for high-priced Internet meal kits? Wal-Mart® is our meal kit.
Cars: Â
Mr. Money Mustache suggests having one or zero of these. And he has a huge financial point. Cars depreciate, so they’re crappy investments. Cars require taxes and licensing and insurance cost annually, so even if you own one, keeping it around so you can drive it costs you annually. And my family has an “N+1†philosophy about cars, where “N†is the number of licensed drivers. Why? We drive used cars, and they need maintenance at a higher rate than brand-new cars. So we have a spare. If we were retired? One car would probably be enough (assuming we didn’t have the teenage boys in the house). And, yes, a car is required for the rural area that we live in – you really couldn’t bike your  ten year old kid to a wrestling tournament (in winter) that’s 100 miles away . . . so we’d need at least one car.
I’m hoping this one is paid for.
Home Maintenance:
If you own a home, something will break. At my house, that seems to happen weekly, and it’s more than me having my 19th nervous breakdown. Some things get fixed when I get around to it, like when one Wilder child broke the bannister. It sounds like I’m blaming the kid, but I’m really not – if the bannister had been put together correctly in the first place (or fixed better than I did when last I fixed it) then it wouldn’t have broken in the first place. This bannister got broken, oh, six years ago. It still swings loosely. I’ve never even been close to being motivated enough to fix it. But when the air conditioner pan rusted out and started leaking condensed water onto the bathroom carpet? Yeah. Fixed in 12 hours.
And I estimate that immediate repairs (not fixing the place up) that are required to make the place habitable are probably about 1% of the home value each year. If you’re handy and can do it yourself? So much the better. When the hot tub “brain board†fried? I consulted with a hot tub repair guy and swapped it out myself – saving about $200 in the process. When the flame rollout sensor on the furnace went out in winter?
I paid to have that done, since the consequences of screwing that up involved mortality via explosion or asphyxiation if I screwed it up. $25 part, $50 in labor, and fixed that afternoon. My rule is: if it doesn’t require real expertise and can’t kill anyone? Sure, I’ll try that. I’ve saved thousands by doing that – but I think (after putting two complete roofs on and fixing two others), I’m done roofing. Enough roofing.
Medical Insurance:
Medical insurance is the biggest variable to deal with for anyone attempting to retire early. I will say this gently: the health care system in the United States is the most unholy mixture of the worst parts of socialism and near-monopoly capitalism on the planet Earth, and that’s the planet that has the Department of Motor Vehicles AND school cafeteria lunches. How is it messed up? On the socialist side: A hospital is forced to treat anyone who shows up. Anyone. By definition, if you don’t have any money, all the hospital can do is send you bills and not take the money you don’t have. So, your incentive? To go to the emergency room whenever you get a sniffle, so everybody who has insurance can pay for you.
On the evil capitalist side? Hospitals don’t have to let you know what they’re billing you, or why. Your ability to even remotely influence your bill is nearly zero. From Karl Denninger’s post on how to fix healthcare – emphasis in original (LINK): “. . .  the practice of charging someone $100,000 for scorpion antivenom in Arizona when the same drug from the same company is $200 for the same quantity 40 miles to the south and across the Mexican border.â€Â Denninger’s post has a list of similar issues – and common sense solutions that we’ll never undertake. Why? Look at the stock prices of the drug companies and the insurance companies. Who would want to mess that party up?
MMM discusses his vexation with insurance in a pretty good post here (LINK). Since I’m working at a job and have crappy insurance from them, I’ve not scouted the market too much – but my last look at the market mirrors MMM’s. But in addition to the horrible composition
But up until you are ready for Medicare (and until your spouse is, too, which is a consideration for me, having married a younger – but still legal in most states! – woman) you’ll have this risk. Medical insurance costs are estimated to rise between 15% and 30% next year. And 7% thereafter. Said simply, medical costs can’t continue to increase at that rate. And when something can’t continue? It won’t. The system will break. Insurance companies will go bankrupt, as every body . . . walks away. When people can’t pay for insurance, they won’t.
But if you’re retired, have insurance while you can until the system breaks. After that? The rules will change again. This will happen even if you are working.
So what does it all mean?
Retiring early has risks, but, so does life. One thing I’ve seen is we certainly don’t know what’s around the corner. If you could retire early and found out later you had a terminal disease, wouldn’t it be great if you retired early? No. You’d still be dead. Seriously. Dead is dead.
Retire early only if you don’t find what you’re doing fun. If you’re having a blast at work and it has meaning to you, keep doing it until you die. Why retire from a dream job?
I mean, who else would watch Johnny Depp’s finances for him? By the way, what’s the best way to clean the money after having a money bath?
“Listen to what I’m telling you. You go find a doctor. Get me Dr. Kildare. Get me Dr. Livingston. Get me Dr. Frankenstein. Just get me a doctor! Go where the – go where the doctors hang out.” – The Cannonball Run
Eastbound and down . . . .
This week there were some amazing health care headlines:
Four Year Old Nearly Dies After Trying On Shoes Without Socks
Kratom Tea Left Teen with Brain Damage
Fran Drescher talks about Cannabis
Vanilla Ice Trapped on Quarantine Plane
New Miracle Cigar and Brandy Diet Found in Winston Churchill’s Notes
Sadly, I only made up one of those headlines. I’ll leave it to you to guess which one.
But that’s the problem with health news nowadays: much of it (if not all) is either poorly understood by the journalist, completely useless to the average reader, only news because a celebrity says it, or versions “cat chases dog” – stories of medical occurrences so rare that winning the lottery is more likely than your kid putting a shoe on without a sock and getting sepsis. Humanity, for most of its existence, didn’t even have crude footwear like Roman sandals, but rather had to make due with inferior shoes like Nikes®.
But why do people like to read the stories of how new Princess Whatsername® has had warts burned off her forehead since getting married to Prince Gingerhair? Or how that maybe if they only ate skinless Pacific salmon that they could lose weight and have fewer forehead warts?
Health is funny. People like to hide from their health. Heck, people like to hide from the truth.
The truth about health is stunningly simple.
Get exercise. Lift weights.
Don’t eat too much, especially sugar. ESPECIALLY high fructose corn syrup.
Butter is awesome.
Don’t drink too much. Just enough to be happy, not enough so that drinking makes you miserable. “A pleasure too often becomes a punishment.”
If you weigh too much, eat less.
You probably shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. Cigars are much better for you.
Get enough sleep so you feel happy when the alarm goes off.
Have a job that’s good enough so you feel happy when the alarm goes off.
Deal with your family in such a way that you feel happy when the alarm goes off.
Have a goal so you want to get out of bed when the alarm goes off.
Be significant. In some way. Build on that.
Be important to someone. Build on that.
Belong somewhere. Build on that.
Don’t spend so that finances are a stress on your life.
Remember to buy yourself something stupid that makes you happy once in a while. (Not too often.)
Build a small, elite fighting training center in Southeast Asia and create about 1000 henchmen. Brainwash them into undying loyalty – I mean these guys should jump in front of a bullet to save your life. You’ll need them when you take over Bangladesh. Not that I could figure out why you’d want to take over Bangladesh . . .
Set your expectations low so that what you expect doesn’t make you mad and disappointed every day.
Set your expectations high so that you can achieve more than you ever thought you could.
Understand that the last two points disagree. Deal with it. You have to get by that or you can’t do anything.
Vitamins are good, probably. If you have money and can buy them, research them and buy a few. If you can’t, buy cheap ones like vitamin C. It can’t hurt you and might help. I’ll probably do another vitamin post in the near future.
Almost anything can be a weapon. If you’re in an unexpected fight, fight for your life. Be aware of your situation. Practice something that gives you an edge in self-defense. Practice it regularly.
Don’t get strung out about the normal risks of life. There are 13,000 or so middle schools (grades 6, 7, and 8) in the United States. So, there are about 60,000 total coaches. 30,000 of them lost this week. They deal with that. You should, too. You won’t win every game. Some of your risks won’t pay out.
You can choose to be a victim or not. Make a decision. Choice is yours. But if you leave yourself in a position to be a victim? Remember, you chose it.
But, strangely, these twenty-three points don’t make headlines. Why? I didn’t have to tell them to you. You knew them already.
So do them.
Or don’t. But don’t tell me you don’t know them. You know, every morning, if you’re doing them or not.
Does anyone have a good contact in Southeast Asia for a henchmen training service?
“You have learned to bury your guilt with anger. I will teach you to confront it, and to face the truth. You know how to fight six men. We can teach you how to engage six hundred. You know how to disappear. We can teach you to become truly invisible.” – Batman Begins (The good 2005 one, not the earlier crap.)
If you don’t read this blog, I’ll shoot this car. Then wouldn’t you feel guilty?
I sat staring at the ceiling in the darkened apartment, the lights from the parking lot casting shadows on the walls. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. Finally, I resorted to reading. I’d read every night until I literally fell asleep with a book in my hand. I remembered, in particular, reading a big, heavy hardcover at the time, one that was about 1053 pages long.
I was being eaten alive inside. I was wracked with guilt.
What was I scared of?
Well, I hadn’t finished my master’s degree yet, but I had moved halfway across the country and started a new job. No one was asking me about my degree, but I knew that dreaded moment was coming soon. “So, John Wilder, where’s your degree? We need to see a copy.”
This was impossible. My thesis wasn’t even written yet. And I had moved halfway across the United States and taken a new job.
My torture continued. Outside of the lack of sleep, the guilt from knowing that I hadn’t finished my degree sent a chill down my spine (or is it up my spine?) every time I thought about it. At work. Shopping. Waxing my moose statue. Finally, after a week or so of this torture, I went in to my boss, who was only five or so years older than me. We started off talking about the work I was doing. At the end I brought up the degree.
John Wilder: “Oh, and one other thing, I’m not quite done with my master’s yet, I still need to finish and defend my thesis.”
Boss: “Whatever. I’m not even sure the company cares. In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. We hired you, not a degree.”
And that was that.
In that moment all the fear left me, and I felt silly for worrying about it, and even sillier for keeping it bottled up inside of me, eating away at me like a Kardashian at an all-you-can-eat waffle and cream cheese covered bacon buffet. Sometimes that horrible truth you have bottle up inside of you . . . is no problem at all.
This has been the norm in my life: if I confronted the problem, or was honest about it upfront, the problem (most times) went away. And when the problem didn’t go away, fixing it because I was honest and upfront was easier than the times (in the past) that I’d waited to confront the issue.
Guilt is a cousin to Worry, and not the good kind of cousin that brings a twelve-pack to your backyard barbeque and then offers to watch your kids so you and the wife can go have a dinner out. No. Guilt is a bad cousin that shows up at 3am, kicks your dog, and eats that steak leftover you have in the fridge while talking with its mouth full and smelling vaguely like a wooden barroom floor near a Marine base. But Guilt and Worry are related.
Worry is paying for the future problems you might have, whereas Guilt is worrying about the repercussions from past actions. Let’s be real: I wasn’t worried so much about not having the degree (I did finish it a year later) but was really worried about having moved halfway across the country only to be fired and become economically destitute – a warning sign for future people to say, “don’t be like that idiot.” I had done the deed. Or in this case not done it. My question was what would happen once I’d been found out.
And most of the time your imagination can create future consequences far scarier than they ever would be in normal reality. Unfortunately, I’m an imaginative guy. I can go from getting a “C” in a college class to getting kicked out of school to living in a squalid drug den and smelling like Johnny Depp in about three steps.
The choices (if you don’t want to eat yourself up alive inside) are simple: confront the guilt, or, better yet?
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” – Blade Runner
I wonder if there is any symbolism in this artwork? I guess we’ll never know.
Recently I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS.
It’s interesting. I enjoy it.
Philip K. Dick’s work (you never see him referred to as “Phil” or “Phil Dick”, it’s always Philip K. Dick, just like John F. Kennedy is always known as “Sassy”) has taken over Hollywood. From Total Recall to Minority Report to Blade Runner to The Man in the High Castle, Dick’s work has been made into something like 14 movies and an entire series of shorter television episodes available on Amazon® Prime™. In what might be the most ironic ending ever, he only really became popular after his death, with Blade Runner being released just a few months after he died at the age of 53.
The story themes that he visited during his life were fairly consistent:
What is the nature of reality? What if it’s a lie?
How do we know that we are sane?
What if reality is insane? What should our response be?
What is information? Is it living?
Where can I get more drugs? I mean a LOT more drugs.
VALIS is based on (at least partly) a vision that he had in February and March of 1974, and describes a lot of things that Dick said personally happened to him, which include a secret Roman Empire that still existed, aliens, and the fact that his son had a hernia that would kill him if he didn’t have the doctor look at it. The hernia part is verified. The secret Roman Empire? Not so much. Oh, did I mention he did a LOT of drugs? Yeah. He made Hunter S. Thompson seem like a virgin.
However, as a writer he had an amazing amount of insight, which may account for the popularity. One quote that struck me was an interesting philosophical digression in VALIS:
Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way that he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain – any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes automatically, anhedonic (avoiding pleasure – JW). Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer his gratification, he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has “control”. Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and a controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not consciously aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he derives no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essentially negative.
This idea is fascinating to me. In this case, a virtue, self-restraint and stoicism, is turned into a vice. And not only a vice, a vice that replicates itself and spreads its misery around.
I see this most often among people who have no real control or power in their lives – the people who sit on Homeowner’s Association boards and send out little notes that my grass is too long, or that my siding needs to be washed, or that they object to the new “sheet metal hammering and shredding at midnight with strippers” business that I set up. The phrase that I’m reminded of that describes these people is: “The fight is so bitter because the stakes are so small,” which is a paraphrasing of Wallace Sayre’s original quote, “I hate going to the Department of Motor Vehicles”. So, not only do you not like going to the DMV, we’ve learned that they hate being there as much as you do, so they share their misery as much as possible.
But Dick’s quote also explains why people become self-destructive. If they sense that they’re going to fail, well, they’ll toss some gasoline on that fire and get it going now. The logic becomes simple – I don’t really fail if I control my failure. Or deprive myself of pleasure. I know I don’t deserve the money, so I’ll just save it until I die and leave it to my cats. My ability to defer today’s pleasure becomes . . . a way to punish myself today.
And yet . . . there’s that leading stoic, Seneca:
“Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn’t get drunk, not with words, but by the facts of its ugliness and offensiveness. It is easy to prove that pleasures, when they go beyond proper measures, are punishments.”
Absolutely there is virtue in self-control. Right up until it becomes a vice. Like lots and lots and lots of drugs. Lots of drugs. And maybe Crossfit™.
“And the first question is for you, Karl Marx. The Hammers. The Hammers is the nickname of what English football team?” – Monty Python
I tried writing with a broken pencil once. It was pointless.
I have the same pencil since the Clinton administration. Not just in a junk drawer someplace, but as my daily use pencil at work. It’s not some yellow No. 2 pencil that I’ve sharpened until it’s a microscopic nub, rather, it’s a blue mechanical pencil, made in Japan. It’s a Cross® pencil, and has the original eraser but the eraser is so old that it looks more like a green petrified pterodactyl nipple rather than something that belongs in a book bag, and it’s harder than year-old chewing gum and just tears the paper rather than erasing anything.
I’ve used the pencil so much that the paint has worn off the brass and tin metal parts. It’s been dropped, chipped, and glued back together. The part that’s supposed to clip it to your pocket is loose and wobbles.
I won the pencil for a speech I gave during a corporate training program, about the time my career took off, so it has some special memories for me. I never intended to have this pencil forever, it just hung around at first. And then I noticed it was there on super-awesome days, like when I got divorced, or when I met The Mrs. And after six or so years, I decided I’d keep it.
I have a pen, too, but it’s really new. I got it in 2000, so I’ve only had it for 18 years.
Quirky, I know.
I mentioned my pencil to a friend, and she noted that she has rocks. From places. She knows where and when she got each one.
She mentioned that when she met her husband, he pointed out a closed box. It contained the rocks.
Husband to be: “What’s in that?”
“Oh, you’d better not look in there.”
Now, I believe, they’re in her garden. She knows where they are, and when she moves? She’ll crate up her rocks and they’ll go with her. Obviously, I understand.
A psychologist would call these “attachment objects.” Given the choice between my beat up, old Cross™ pencil and a brand-new and shiny Cross® pencil? I’d take my scuffed up ancient pencil any day. A new one could never replace a pencil I’ve had with me for most of my career. In my mind it has some sort of property ate differentiates it in some way from every other pencil on Earth.
This pencil is mine.
Another example – I bought a Blackberry® in 2008. Oh, sure, it was only six years old when I got a new Samsung™ in 2014. I know, how un-American of me. You should replace your cell phone weekly.
But I picked it up a few weeks ago. It felt . . . dead. It felt alien, inanimate.
This tendency to place value on inanimate objects is greatest in people and groups that score highest in individuality, and lowest in collectivist-oriented people, so I imagine that Karl Marx went through pencils like nobody’s business.
And Venezuela? Don’t even get me started.
Perhaps that’s why socialist societies always fail: all of the means of production eventually become focused on generating replacement pencils?
The view from the coffeemaker (story below). No coffee was injured in the making of this post.
I was talking with a coworker at the coffee machine back when I was working in Houston. Our offices were in the 45th story of a gleaming skyscraper. Very futuristic.
“So, Mr. W, what do you think the most important invention was?â€Â I have no idea why he called me Mr. W, but it’s been a theme – Mr. W. No idea why.
“Ever?†I asked. This was the setup.
“Sure. Most important invention ever.â€
“Agriculture.â€
I love it when I look into a person’s eyes and literally watch their brain slowly melt from the answer they just got. That was the case here. For a full fifteen seconds he didn’t move, blink, or breathe. I think his brain was rebooting.
After he got past the login screen: “That’s . . . that’s a good one.â€
I had that answer ready because I’d been thinking about just that. What was the most significant invention in history? Heck, even the Bible talks about it – the story where Cain (the farmer) killed his brother Abel (the sheep herder)? It’s potentially an allegorical story about where agricultural civilization replaced the earlier pastoral civilization that’s come down to us over thousands of years.
Or maybe Cain was just a dick. I kid. We all know Abel had it coming.
However, agriculture was transformative. Prior to that, it was hunting, gathering, and herding. Or starving if you didn’t know how to hunt, gather and herd.
Agriculture was an important step – it made people stop moving around. If you planted a crop, you had to stay there and grow it. And if you stayed there, and had food? Now you had to defend it. And you had to have houses. And you could make pots. And buy furniture from StoneAgeIKEA®, which was largely abandoned by 3000 B.C. because no one had invented screws or hex wrenches.
Just that one invention changed economics, developed division of labor could exist. Mankind now had farmers, soldiers, generals, and developed taxation and accountants.
Yeah. Taxes.
But this didn’t make mankind a bit healthier. In fact, it made the average person die sooner. Oh, and when they died? They had new diseases like arthritis. And they didn’t grow as tall or as robust as their nomadic ancestors.
Why did we do it? Dunno. Women like houses, probably. And men could brew beer (which happened to show up about the same time as the first agricultural settlements. That same downfall occurs throughout history – women and beer.
I assure you that you didn’t want to mess with this guy. And he was probably average. Not sure that Twinkies®, cars, and air conditioning helped his overall health . . . . and I’m sure that Google® now thinks I want to see pictures of shirtless men. Oh, the things I do for you, readers.
Let’s face it, not everything that modern medicine has done has helped our health. Some studies have shown that the nomads and herdsmen, on average, lived longer than the farmers that followed them in history. Oh, and don’t forget, if you don’t have farms, no need for slaves, right?
But let’s look at medicine more directly:
What actual changes have made life healthier?
Well, agriculture has increase the overall amount of nutrition. We wouldn’t be able to feed everyone on Earth if we didn’t have that.
Maternal vitamins and nutrition make healthier and smarter babies. That’s good.
Sanitation is amazing. Not living in poop somehow makes you healthier. Who could have imagined that?
Cheap food. Hard to be healthy if you’ve starved to death.
Pest control. Vermin are also not real healthy to live with. Plague and all, right?
Clean drinking water is much better than the alternative, but not as good as Scotch, which I guess is another alternative, so clean drinking water is second.
Antiseptics are good. Much less Civil War surgery.
Antibiotics are also pretty good. I’m pretty sure that they’ve saved my life more than once.
Trauma surgery is now awesome – many things you would have died from 20 years ago are now survivable, from gunshots to car accidents.
Vaccinations are, on balance, probably good. Is there proof that they kill people?  More people have died from HPV vaccinations than from HPV. So, yeah. But I’ll skip the small pox, thank you. Oh, they don’t vaccinate for that anymore?
So, what’s not on this list?
End of life care. It’s expensive. And it barely makes life longer.
Many cancer treatments are difficult and require hacking and poisoning the sick person. Some really do extend life, for decades even. (Some don’t do much of anything.) But none are more important than clean water, exercise, and PEZ™ to human health.
Most really expensive diagnostic tech. Sure, some of it is awesome, but I’m not sure an MRI machine is all that awesome.
What societal changes are actually hurting health?
Cheap food. Yeah, it’s a paradox. Starve or be fat. Sue me.
Automatic stuff.  As a whole, we have to do much less work than 20 years ago. Much, much less than 40 years ago. And 100 years ago? Oh, my. Elevators replaced stairs. Natural gas replaced firewood. Cars replaced bikes. Exercise drops through the floor.
Climate controls. I’ve got a theory that if you turned off the air conditioning and the heat in your house you’d actually be healthier. But this theory will never be tested because I have The Mrs., for whom climate control is a right up there with free speech and free shotguns. Thankfully she likes it about 60°F in the house all the time, too.
What is in Doritos? 40 different ingredients, many of which have never been incorporated into the diet of a human until the last 50 years. What’s in a steak? Cow, which we’ve been eating as soon as we developed spears. Because steak is worth building a spear and chasing a wild, untamed giant auroch through the forest.
Lack of genetic culling. I’m not in favor of this as a policy, but it is a fact that the genetic pool is degraded over time when people who would have died out reproduce and pass along defective genes. Let’s look at me: I wear glasses, and developed the need about age 20. I would have made a crappy nomadic warrior, so, unless I was smart, I would be squinting at the horizon while Ugg and Trevor chased the hairless caribou across the frozen tundra of the African veldt. And no food for my family. So we died off. But wait! This is 2018, and I’ve got lots of kids because I don’t have to squint, but glasses? Yeah, that’s a thing for half my kids. Ugg and Trevor had kids with keen eyesight. Again, not a policy since I like my life and the kids I have, but as we save more people with health issues like my nearsightedness that can be passed along genetically?
Like anything, there are good and bad effects of changing our civilization. Without agriculture, we never get to the Moon, but we also never get Nicholas Cage movies. A tradeoff?
“We’re out of towels and I’m too old to go diving into lockers.” – Minor League
It would be nice to have Morgan Freeman narrate your life. Except for after you did stupid stuff. Or boring stuff. Nevermind – skip that.
A number of years ago my boss called me at 11pm. There had been an incident at work. As it was a Thursday and I was planning on taking Friday off, The Mrs. and I had already consumed the better part of a bottle of wine. I decided that I’d go to bed – certainly vacation was off.
In fact, I worked the next 45 days, straight. I averaged at least 12 hours a day, every day.
During that time, we worked really hard. Stressful situations daily. New decisions daily. But the team met all the goals that were set on that first day, and then some. We even ended up at budget. But 540 work hours in 1.5 months is about 225% of a typical work week (40 hours).
I break my time into a triangle:
Work – Ideally, work should server multiple purposes. It should put money in the bank and food on the table. Another, very real purpose of work is to create value for society. A well-run business generates wealth for the owner, sure. But the jobs that it creates can generate wealth for a community. And most businesses can’t stay in business unless they serve a need in the community. A power generation plant has to make power to stay in business, but if it operates well and efficiently, it produces power at a low cost, which allows people to have the relative luxury of electricity cheaply, so they can read this blog, or watch Green Acres®.
Family – As a husband and father, taking care of my family is a primary responsibility – it means more than the money from work, it means being there to be dad – both as a bad example of the kind of dad you don’t want to have, as well as teaching children responsibility through situations that force them to figure things out. I mean, what 12 year old shouldn’t know how to make a fake id so he can buy smokes?
Personal Health – If I’m not healthy, I’ll die, and that makes it hard to shower consistently. Also, I won’t be able to lead my family, or work amazingly long hours. Health may be its own reward, but it also supports the other two legs of the triangle.
I’d say “bad dog,” but I am out of beer . . . and thanks to practice and parental neglect, Pugsley makes a much better fake ID.
So during this 45 day period, a big stretch of the triangle was possible. Heck, I was in the best shape I’d been in for at least six years. Life was good. I’d focus on work, but put my second focus on family. Personal health can wait, right?
And during those 45 days, I didn’t exercise like normal. Also, I don’t eat lunch (I hadn’t since fifth grade) and in those days just worked through lunch. But we had team meetings (complete with lunch) pretty much every day. It turns out I can gain 2 pounds a week just by eating lunch more than once. Yeah.
So, forty five days later, we finished. And we were exhausted. And 45 days later? I entered into yet another work death-march that lasted a year and a half.
Yeah, and that second death-march ended with 45 days straight, too. And then time required for activities related to The Boy and Pugsley multiplied. It seems like when the work demands went down, the family demands went up. And I could safely ignore the health demands, right?
My take on this is that I’ve set my boundaries too far towards work in the past, but the bright side is all the hard work and family stuff seems to be paying off.
But it’s always (a bit) irritated me that Hollywood types get so buff. I saw Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 12 (or whatever) this last weekend, and it’s undeniable that the man is in great shape, not only for his age, but for any age. Cruise was certainly in better shape than he was during his early movies. He’s seven or eight years older than Simon Pegg, but manages to look ten years younger. I guess maybe Scientology® might pay off, if you can deal with whole “completely made up” parts.
And Tom Cruise has a luxury that most of us don’t – he has the ability to spend 2,000 learning to fly helicopters so he could do it for this movie, plus countless thousands of hours of training. I’m lucky to get 250 hours a year to myself for training. And more power to Cruise! But most people don’t have that option. The iron triangle of work-family-health keeps showing up.
In the end that’s part of why I named the blog wilderwealthywise.com – it focuses on that triangle of important things in the average person’s life. Wealth buys time, and time buys health. And health . . . buys more time (on Earth). And with health and time? One would hope that you can end up with wealth.
And then you could have Morgan Freeman narrate . . . but hopefully not these lines:
It will all be worth it. Now, back to the elliptical . . .
Okay, my dog ate my hard drive, so I’m stuck using memes tonight. Let all of your memes be dank, my friends! And, yes, that’s Charlie Sheen pretending to be Patrick Swayze’s brother. Thankfully, no C. Thomas Howell was injured during the writing of this post.
So, there’s a very strong correlation between health and IQ. It’s even stronger than the correlation between living in California and being forced to have a statue of Karl Marx™ in your front yard. Really!
The short version is this: if you’re smarter, you’ll live longer. And not only will you live longer, but you’ll enjoy your life more. It’s like winning the lottery twice, though I’m reliably informed that smart people don’t play the lottery – they own the lottery, just like Elon Musk gets a bright new penny every time someone plugs a toaster into the wall.
But the smarter you are? The longer you’ll live.
Bright people live longer than average people. Geniuses live longer than bright people. And people like me? Maybe I’ll live forever, if the beer holds out.
IQ is baked into the baby from the start – the top number is almost all genetics. Can you mess a baby’s IQ up? Sure! If Mom loves Margaritas, well, that’s a good way to bake a few brain cells while the baby is cooking. Likewise, youthful malnutrition can hurt intellect – but this type of malnutrition isn’t “eating Big Macs® instead of “vegan free range kale,” no, this is starvation-level malnutrition.
Extra study, extra education can’t make you smarter. You are as smart as you is. You are as smart as you ever will be.
But there is a limit – once you reach the age of 80? All the life expectancy logic changes. The measure then is how much IQ you’ve lost. If you went from 160 IQ to loving Two and a Half Men, well, your days are numbered. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but the truth is if you love Charlie Sheen you’re halfway to dementia. Except it’s okay for you to like Red Dawn. Which is just awesome.
WOLVERINES!
There’s another limit. If you’re one of the 100,000 to 140,000 people on Earth with an IQ of 163 or more? Yeah, that’s the limit. More IQ than 163 won’t help you live any longer, so thankfully Bill Gates won’t be around in the year 2573. But I’ve heard his clones will, so there’s that.
So what else do the statistics say about being smart and your likelihood of death?
If you’re smart, your mortality against cancer is better, but only if that cancer is from smoking. All other cancers are the same between normies and eggheads. What about suicide? Yeah, smarter people do that a bit more often.
But high IQ people take MUCH less sick leave than lower IQ folks. (Coincidentally, I haven’t taken a sick day since 2002, and that day was because I was shot while saving Emilia Earhart from being cooked and eaten by Kevin Spacey.)
But let’s look at how being smart impacts health. If you’re smart, you have a:
Lower risk of heart disease.
Lower level of obesity.
Lower blood pressure.
Lower risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, and this was correlated to people who had stressful events in their life, like being forced to watch a movie starring Amy Schumer.
Lower risk of stroke.
Lower risk of schizophrenia.
Lower risk of schizophrenia.
Hey, I said that first.
No you didn’t.
Yes I did.
Lower chance of being bipolar, which I think refers to having houses at the North Pole and the South Pole. But not being a bear. Or belonging to a homeowner’s association.
Oddly, if you have a high IQ? Your risk of skin cancer goes up. I have my theories there, but they mainly relate to our naked smart people sunbathing parties global warming.
Downsides of being smart? You drink more. Sometimes a lot more. Oh, wait, that was a downside?
Also? You smoke a LOT more weed. Which makes me think that you’d be ready for some dank memes. What are they, really?
Dunno. But the fifth image for “dank meme” on my Google® search led me to this:
“It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage . . .†– Raiders of the Lost Ark
If only I could find a temple to raid, then I could pay for insurance . . .
Okay, this is listed as part I. I don’t have a part II planned, really, but I sometimes think we look at health in a really messed up way so I’m sure at some point I’ll have another post, or I’ll forget about this one and do it again. Guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing Super-Glue®.
First, what is health? I did some thinking about it (it was in the morning, and I’m not sure I had enough caffeine for this function) but I came up with my own definition. Enjoy!
Physically able to do stuff you want to do.
Mentally able to do stuff you want to do.
Not in constant or unreasonable pain.
The body is (generally) working the way it’s supposed to.
Stuff that should stay in, stays in. Stuff that should stay out, stays out.
Not missing critical bits and pieces.
The bits that are left, generally work pretty well.
No bits are ready to fail right away (that you know of).
Absence of current system disruption (you don’t have a cold or the flu).
I think this is a very different definition from the rest of the world. I’ll argue that this definition makes a lot of sense if the goal is happy people. If I want to go run, and I can do it, and am not suffering from some sort of stress thing that makes me think that if I go running that the kimono-clad ghost of Tom Petty will chase me around with a butcher knife, well, I’m healthy enough to run.
And I am healthy enough to run. Once per week. Maybe. My knees, after a lifetime of football, wrestling, and running from booby traps while pilfering South American treasure are, well, shot and will hurt like Bernie Sanders trying to explain how a socialist mayor is a multimillionaire. And I like running. So, I guess when it comes to running, I’m not exactly healthy.
My hair. Where did it go? Oh, my back, and my ears. So I’m missing some bits, but unless it’s sunny outside, well, I’m okay – these aren’t critical bits.
So, if I had a sudden heart attack tomorrow and died, am I healthy today? Surprisingly, by my definition, I am totally healthy. Nothing in my definition of health implies indefinite or infinite life. Nor should it.
Tonight, The Boy dropped a glass cup on the floor of the kitchen. It shattered, since we live in a reality where glass doesn’t bounce.
Twenty minutes later? The Mrs. walked into the kitchen and stepped completely on a shard (not a shart, which was my original typo) of glass. Immediately blood poured from her heel like money from Elon Musk’s Tesla® factory. Yeah, it was a lot of blood. I mean a lot. I immediately asked The Boy to wipe that up so the dogs didn’t get into it.  Even though the dogs are small enough that you could stomp them if they went crazy, I have a strict policy of NOT teaching the dogs to like the taste of human flesh.
So, The Mrs.’ inside bits became outside bits. Healthy? Sure. I think. The Mrs. claims she has a tetanus shot that’s recent enough to keep her alive, so I’ll go with that. But the line that I said to The Boy and Pugsley that is worth repeating is this: “You’re Mom’s going to die! I mean, not tonight, but sometime.â€
And that’s normal. Death is normal.
A lot of the current focus of medicine is on saving life. Duh. But a huge amount of the money is spent on the last year and last month of life. When life sucks. If the outrageous spending on the last month of life, when let’s face it, you have much worse problems than a shard (shart) of glass in your heel, well, is that money well spent?
Not by my definition. Literally, not by my definition above.
Hey, I’m not trying to stop you from spending whatever money you want on whatever you want. If you want to spend $400,000 for a 50% probability of living another two months stuck in a hospital bed at 147 years old? Sure! Go for it.
But that’s not how it works. Virtually no one spends their own money on health care when they’re in the last year of their life – this money is coming from Medicare®. And Medicare™ money? It comes from you. And me. I’m not happy about public radio, let alone public funding of health care, but it’s a real thing, so how do we make it suck less than it does now? (Not the radio, the health care.)
I’d much rather spend that money on making life better for people who are Kindaâ„¢ Healthy®. People who are in otherwise pretty good shape. I’m also entirely against euthanasia. It’s murder. Make whatever argument you want – but when you turn doctors and hospitals into consciously life-ending organizations? Yeah, you’re not on the side of the angels. “OMG – this baby has NO chance of making it into Harvardâ„¢! Better end it all now.â€
Part of the problem of healthcare today is that we’ve disconnected virtuous actions with reward. Sure, they can charge you more money for insurance if you’re a smoker, but the current system allows anyone to skip out on paying for insurance, and then only purchasing it after they get sick. That’s not insurance – it’s a con job.
That’s not insurance, that’s a cheat. And it irritates me. I’ve been paying for insurance for myself (either directly or as part of a job) since I was 22 or so – hundreds of thousands of dollars into a system that we’ve pulled very little out of. Heck, I haven’t been to a doctor since 2012 (being healthy) and I just needed some antibiotics at that point. Allowing people to be non-virtuous (be a freeloader until sick) breaks the system.
My brother, Other John Wilder, told me a story (a LONNNNNG time ago) about a wife and mother who was without insurance. She got cancer. She didn’t have insurance. The doctors wouldn’t do anything to help her. She died.
A tragedy? Sure. And I’m sorry for her.
Plan better. Really. If the taxpayer (or, worse yet, insurance payers like me) bails out every sad story? Yeah, the insurance costs will explode. Like they have.
What else ails our system?
Litigation. I think our system would be much better if we removed judicial and jury decisions and replaced it with trial by combat to the death. With the attorneys involved being the combatants. It might not be a fair decision, but it would be awesome television.
Sir Habeas Corpus, Attorney at Arms™. Okay, Attorney at Arms™ might be a really cool idea for a short story or a book series. I hereby trademark thee!
Insurance is really a problem. It requires a ton of codes, and billing staff, and it’s a risk (if you’re a doctor or a patient) if you’re going to get the money. I was reading on the Internet about the Surgery Center of Oklahoma®. No insurance. They don’t take it. Cash only. And if you don’t have cash, don’t show up – they won’t treat you. Their costs for surgery are often less than the copay for insurance or Medicare™.
Don’t believe me? Go to their website and check it out (LINK). It would be nice where . . . you could just avoid insurance and government altogether . . . .
And hospitals mark stuff up. Here is a bill of a guy who got bit by a rattlesnake. Note the cost for “Pharmacy†– this is almost all anti-venom. Costs $200 a vial in Mexico. Let’s say this guy had to have 20 vials. That’s $4,000.
Snakes. Did it have to be snakes?
Yeah. They marked the stuff up 20 times. If you or I did that? They’d avoid a trial and just execute us. But for lifesaving drugs that you have no choice but to take, like anti-venom or insulin? The hospitals look to remove your wallet through your throat, like they did with Pugsley’s stitches.
Yeah, he was camping with the Organization Formerly Known as Boy Scouts. He had his knife out, and was whittling a piece of wood. No, his finger. The Mrs. took him to the emergency room. Three stiches. $4,000.
Yeah. If it would have been up to me? I’d have Super-Glued® it shut and we’d have solved the whole problem for $1.42.
Super-Glue®. Can it save American health care? Only one way to find out . . . .
