Spend on others, especially people you are close to.
This one sounds dubious to me if you happen to be rich. I always thought that if I were rich, I would make a public precommitment only to give away money to worthy charities, so as to avoid worry that anyone trying to get close to me was really trying to get close to the money. Maybe it doesn’t work out that way?
It seems simpler to just include my money in what I identify with. I mean, it doesn’t bug me that people trying to get close to me might really be trying to get close to my sense of humor, or my appearance, or my kind demeanor, or various other attributes of mine. Why make an exception for money?
But the more traditional solution to this “problem” is to make friends among people with roughly the same level of wealth.
I wouldn’t mind letting people who get close to me partake of my sense of humor, attractiveness, or good nature, because these aren’t resources that are diminished by being shared among others. But if people want to get close to me in order to induce me to distribute my expendable resources among them, I’m going to feel resentful, because anything I spend on them is an opportunity cost, and they’re faking signals that would qualify them for special consideration in my utility function. If they weren’t pretending to enjoy my company for any other reason, and were open about just wanting to be where the money was, I would feel comfortable rebuffing them.
(I somehow failed to notice this response until just now.)
(nods) Yeah, I resonate emotionally with this, but on consideration I don’t really endorse it.
Even things like humor and kindness are functions of attention, which is also a limited resource, and attractiveness plays a complex role in social-status economies. If someone were open about just pretending to be my friend in order to get access to those resources, it seems I ought to feel just as comfortable rebuffing them, although I expect that in practice I would mostly be confused, since I do not have as clear an understanding of social resources as I do of money.
Having friends at all costs attention, but I don’t invest extra attentional resources into being funny or kind to people around me. If anything, it takes less energy for me to be friendly and funny around people I’m comfortable with than it does for me to be distant or awkward around people I’m uncomfortable with. If I’m going to invest my attention into spending time with people at all, I’d rather they be positive interactions.
Interesting. It definitely does consume extra resources for me. I became most vividly aware of this after my stroke, when attentional resources were very scarce, and I often ran out of them in mid-interaction, and even basic social interaction became incredibly exhausting; my irritation about this very much resembled the feeling of having all my employed friends insisting on going out to dinner when I was unemployed and poor. (I don’t care about it so much anymore, in either area, because I’m now running a large surplus of both money and attention.)
This one sounds dubious to me if you happen to be rich. I always thought that if I were rich, I would make a public precommitment only to give away money to worthy charities, so as to avoid worry that anyone trying to get close to me was really trying to get close to the money. Maybe it doesn’t work out that way?
It seems simpler to just include my money in what I identify with. I mean, it doesn’t bug me that people trying to get close to me might really be trying to get close to my sense of humor, or my appearance, or my kind demeanor, or various other attributes of mine. Why make an exception for money?
But the more traditional solution to this “problem” is to make friends among people with roughly the same level of wealth.
I wouldn’t mind letting people who get close to me partake of my sense of humor, attractiveness, or good nature, because these aren’t resources that are diminished by being shared among others. But if people want to get close to me in order to induce me to distribute my expendable resources among them, I’m going to feel resentful, because anything I spend on them is an opportunity cost, and they’re faking signals that would qualify them for special consideration in my utility function. If they weren’t pretending to enjoy my company for any other reason, and were open about just wanting to be where the money was, I would feel comfortable rebuffing them.
(I somehow failed to notice this response until just now.)
(nods) Yeah, I resonate emotionally with this, but on consideration I don’t really endorse it.
Even things like humor and kindness are functions of attention, which is also a limited resource, and attractiveness plays a complex role in social-status economies. If someone were open about just pretending to be my friend in order to get access to those resources, it seems I ought to feel just as comfortable rebuffing them, although I expect that in practice I would mostly be confused, since I do not have as clear an understanding of social resources as I do of money.
Having friends at all costs attention, but I don’t invest extra attentional resources into being funny or kind to people around me. If anything, it takes less energy for me to be friendly and funny around people I’m comfortable with than it does for me to be distant or awkward around people I’m uncomfortable with. If I’m going to invest my attention into spending time with people at all, I’d rather they be positive interactions.
Interesting. It definitely does consume extra resources for me. I became most vividly aware of this after my stroke, when attentional resources were very scarce, and I often ran out of them in mid-interaction, and even basic social interaction became incredibly exhausting; my irritation about this very much resembled the feeling of having all my employed friends insisting on going out to dinner when I was unemployed and poor. (I don’t care about it so much anymore, in either area, because I’m now running a large surplus of both money and attention.)