I’ve been on a years long quest to shore up a decent morning & evening routine that’s not tightly coupled with the routine of the rest of my life. IE that can survive me getting sick or going oncall. This post hit me at a time when I was trying and failing to maintain a lot of simple but high value routines (Easy stuff like journaling ~ every night, remembering to take out the trash before it became a problem, etc). On it’s advice I setup some relevant forfeits … and found that it did not work for me at all, about the same level of motivation as any other task management app.
The fact that loosing $5 a day didn’t feel like any yoinked into my conscious awareness how much my relationship to money had started slipping in an unhealthy direction. I’d graduated school two years previously and started working at big tech … and was getting bit by the lifestyle creep hard.
This context help me notice that this was a *problem* that I was bleeding capital out of inattention in ways that kept me coupled to a job that I didn’t find that fulfilling or want to work long term—and the noticing gave me the push to *pay attention* to my spending and dial my lifestyle.
I post this here as I expect it might be a commonish experience, and I can recommend this as an easy self experiment to test where your psychological relationship to money is.
I really like the ladder metaphor and think it can generalize out to many contexts where something has to go from point A to point B.
Examples.
1. Development economics will sometimes look at what the victorians did on their path to modern wealth for advice on what development countries should do. A lot of this advice doesn’t quite work as the developing world has to contend with all the ways the existence of the very wealthy west changes the landscape (cheap imports, brain drain, etc).
2. Asking my parents for life advice they’ll mention the importance of getting into a cheap mortgage on a single family house …