I recently started one of those life admin tasks that’s been on my to-do list for a while now: writing a last will and testament.
To be clear, I’m fine. But having a will is just good adulting, especially if you are married or a parent. I am neither, but I figured it was a good opportunity to ask my mom and dad if they’d take care of my dog Maddie if I ever died. They agreed.
Most days, I think about money a little too much. I spiral about it to the point where the thinking is just an obsessive tick to the tune of: Am I OK? I’m OK…But wait what if this happens, then am I OK? Yes, I’m still OK. I’m OK I’m OK I’m OK, right?
The truth is that I’m more than OK. I’ve been saving money since I started getting my adult teeth, squirreling away fairy cash, mowing the lawn, scooping ice cream, babysitting — and on into my career starting at my first full-time job making $35K/year in Washington, D.C. When I first started, someone in HR with a suit and a PowerPoint presentation told us to put money into a 401K and I’m pretty sure I was under the impression that it was a government program we were required to support and I just did it very compliantly even though I was still paying off student loans at the time. Bit by bit I learned the ropes of personal finance, paid off my debt within a couple years, and would now consider myself fairly financially literate — despite the fact that I got starry-eyed in 2021 and bought crypto at the top of a bubble based on the advice of a man I was dating who lived in a van. The to-date results of taking these very different pieces of advice — one from PowerPoint lady and the other from van man — could not have been more different. But in reality, I understood neither at the time.
Sometime in my late twenties I first started to understand that when I put money into my 401K, where it’s invested in an index fund, I am in fact investing in a bunch of companies. And just like Chainlink or Bitcoin, I still don’t know a lot about these companies, let alone do I align with their missions. But I’m investing simply for the returns, not because I actually believe they deserve to grow. And that’s starting to rub me the wrong way.
As my financial literacy has matured, so has my skepticism about the state of things. It has been only in the last couple of years that I’ve become more curious not only about the mechanics of basic finances and investing, but also about how deeply out-of-sync with basic rules and laws of nature the vast accumulation of wealth feels to me — both on an individual and a collective scale. Put simply, the modern market works in a linear fashion, but nature is cyclical. Nothing lives forever, nothing grows forever, all new growth comes at the cost of what is cleared out. In the chasm that grows between what we take away from the Earth and what grows as shareholder wealth, we undermine the natural resources that ensure our species even has a legacy to uphold. Meanwhile we watch numbers on a screen change and pretend that everything is fine.
It is a fascinating tension wherein a part of me is determined to save enough to feel “safe” and “covered” and “able to care for myself” while another is very much aware that the simple act of saving for a future time for myself that may not occur means that actual humans right now do not have the same safety, and the Earth is exploited even further. There is an inherent tradeoff, even if we don’t explicitly state it, but at least for me, it feels like the actual choices we have to correct this are limited, because we are just absolutely engrained in the system. The matrix, if you will.
But I’m not giving up on seeking out an alternative.
Financial guru types tell us to invest in the stock market because based on historical performance, the economy gets bigger which really just means that corporations get richer over time. Individuals hold their own slice of the economy in the form of a share, aka their own wealth, and thus by holding shares of a company you get richer (on paper) as a shareholder alongside the corporations. Financial gurus will say, “Yes, it has always been this way, there are 10% returns over the long-term, and so it will always be this way,” and I go, “How long is always?" and they are like, “One hundred years!,” and the geological timescale laughs in response, and can’t stop laughing, and eventually the geological timescale must be escorted out of the room for its rude outburst.
A hundred years is not that long, not by the Earth’s timeline, not by human’s and not even really by modern civilizations’. We know that this period of time since the Industrial Revolution has done a great deal of damage to the Earth. We know that we are being short-sighted. This damage shouldn’t increase the value of the economy, since it is directly undermining how we make things (which isn’t just about human innovation) and also where we make them (this planet).
The best case scenario I can work out is that over time, innovation that propels economic growth is required based on market forces to be the type of innovation that preserves and regenerates our resources, rather than continuing to deplete. That would be more aligned with nature, supported by principles of abundance that fly in the face of supply and demand. I don’t like to give much airtime to apocalyptic ruminations. I want to imagine there is a future for humans. When I think of you, dear reader, I believe in us.
If you want to bring yourself back down to Earth after a climate change anxiety spiral, consider asking a cheery question like: “At what age will I die?”
The answer for me, according to The Longevity Tool, is 96 years. That is 62 years from now, which is a pretty long time, but also, lolz, remember our friend the geological timescale? It is barely a half of a blip.
This calculator was built based on a detailed statistical analysis led by a professor named Dean Foster at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and it cracks me up because in the same breath that it’s like, “Congrats, you did it! You didn’t smoke and you exercised and drank a small amount. You’re going to live for a long time,” it is also like “….BUT WILL YOU HAVE ENOUGH MONEY?” Because again, by the bizarre rules of the matrix we are in, having enough money is required to be able to survive (forget us being able to grow food that you’d buy with that money).
I came upon this calculator after reading, Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. His book contradicted most popular wisdom and advice I’ve been given about personal investing for the past 10 years by proposing that rather than investing and saving to have a “pile of money” to live on and then pass down the excess to heirs, you should instead use your life energy while you can, and thus spend all of your money before you die. His thesis is that by leaving behind our money, we forsake our own life energy, and he encourages people to think more about doing activities they want to do most while they can actually enjoy them, rather than waiting until retirement age when they typically have much lower physical health. He shares examples of how he created elaborate occasions to treat his friends and family — experiences that were literally once-in-a-lifetime. He talks about how he cherishes each of these memories, that the memories themselves paid him back every day in “memory dividends” that couldn’t hold a candle to what that money in the market could have given him, especially if he’d put off enjoying things with that money to when he was old and frail.
As I’m writing this essay, but before I finish writing my will, my favorite song by Kevin Morby comes on. It’s called, “This Is A Photograph” and it goes:
This is a photograph
A window to the past
Of your father on the front lawn
With no shirt on
Ready to take the world on
Beneath the West Texas sun
The year that you were born
The year that you are now
His wife behind the camera
His daughter and his baby boy
Got a glimmer in his eye
Seems to say, this is what I'll miss after I die
And this is what I'll miss about being alive
My body, my girls, my boy, the sun
Morby wrote this song after a sudden health scare his father had that brought him to the hospital. He ended up being OK, and the family later got together at home to thumb through old family photos. That photo inspired the song, which doubles as Morby’s own solemn promise as a musician. When he sings, "this is what I’ll miss about being alive,” on stage, the this is true.
I keep thinking about that line, I keep feeling it rattling through my cells as I dance around my living room: this is what I’ll miss after I die.
I want to live inside the answer to that question as much as possible. What will I miss after I die? That right there is what goes on the memory dividends list. The trade-off feels so alluring: save enough so you aren’t destitute when you can’t work anymore — or else! But I think Perkins gets something correct: we aren’t going to miss our money after we die.
I started to build a Notion board with my memory dividend list. It’s incomplete, but it’s been a fun exercise. It’s full of travel desires, and other glamorous personal goals I hope to accomplish. But it’s also the big stuff of life (get married, buy a house, get a puppy, publish a book) that’s made up of all the small stuff of life (make dinner with someone I love, sweep the floor, water the plants, weed the garden, walk the dog, sit down and write every day). Going after the big stuff in life if the small stuff it entails doesn’t actually appeal? That’s a recipe for badly invested time. That’s like buying shares in a company you think is truly bad.
Closing my eyes to imagine 96, I hope to have the memories of the crazy, silly stuff — jumping out of a plane and swimming with sharks. But I also want to remember the gardens, the meals, the laughter, the scribbles in journals, the aimless walks and finger tips interlaced on love beds and death beds. Then again, 96 is a statistical projection, and not a promise. And in the meantime, the question repeats like a steady drumbeat: What will I miss after I die?
Unless I am to have a drastic change of heart, I won’t be having kids of my own. Perhaps I will write on this topic another time. It’s a realization that harkens as I write my will. I won’t have heirs in a traditional sense, and so the question of legacy comes down to what impact I can possibly make here on the Earth while I am here. I am living my legacy. Aren’t we all? I want the Earth to be better off by my presence. I don’t want to have chased numbers on a screen only to profit through exploitation. I want others to prosper and find joy because of what I did while I lived. And I wonder now, if the answer to this question — of what we leave behind — is about each of us being honest about what we’ll truly miss about being alive, and spending the only time we have doing that thing.
As it happens, I write to you on a cloudy day in the desert, staring off at the mountains with a cup of coffee nearby, the pup is sleeping and I’m smiling from someone checking in to ask how my writing went and I think to myself, this is what I’ll miss after I die. And it is simple and it is small, and thank goodness, it is true.
A Meditation Offering for the Holiday Season
This week, I’m offering a free 9-minute meditation to help you preserve and protect your energies this holiday season. I hope you enjoy and find it useful. Please stay safe and healthy, and I’ll see you next time for my last issue of the year, reflecting on my Word of the Year in 2022, Slowly.
“A meditation on life, wealth, and purpose that is as fresh as it is relatable—without even an ounce of cynicism.”
--what my book review would say if this was a book. (Because I would read it.)