Jacob Schroeder sees money as just one measurable currency. Other currencies in life include attention, reputation, time, health, risk, discipline and play, gratitude, art, hope, love and kindness, and you.
Excerpts:
The downside of favoring the concrete over the abstract is a tendency to place a higher value on tangible, physical things than on the intangible, abstract things. You may want happiness, connection, peace and so on, but you can’t measure, value or touch those things, whereas a medium like money is quantitative and concrete. So, you get preoccupied by maximizing the medium (money) to create an illusion of getting closer to the outcome (happiness).
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Control over attention is control over the direction of life, which takes place in a thousand small decisions. The artist and author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who understood the preciousness of attention better than most, summed it up well in a Twitter post:
“for anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that’s pretty much all the info u need.”
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Time is the one currency perpetually in the minus column. Like water in your hands, it’ll slip away no matter how hard you grip.
And you may not want to grip too tightly. Eliminating every little inconvenience can also unintentionally eliminate things that make life rich, as if burning down your lawn to kill a few weeds. Better to hold your time loosely enough to live as Muir did, without suffering any feeling of haste.
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A healthy lifestyle can pay real long-term dividends. But at the same time, a punishingly restrictive health routine — one that makes you think only of life as assets and liabilities to be calculated and measured rather lived — traps you into a chronic dissatisfaction of its own.
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Because the law of life people are scared to speak out loud is this: it ends. Death is as much a part of life as birth. Put another way, the worst-case scenario is guaranteed from the start. So there’s no reason not to take a few leaps.
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Studies suggest chasing happiness too far leads to unhappiness. The same trap waits at the other extreme for those who worship in the church of self-optimization — the 20-step morning routines, the cold plunges, the sleep scores. The harder you struggle to reach an unrealistic goal, the more pressured you feel to optimize and the more you fall short, leading you further away from the fulfillment you were chasing.
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Giving thanks freely tends to create abundance in life, even in your finances. People who regularly practice gratitude are less impulsive with their spending and more focused on future financial goals. It also seems to make people less materialistic.
The fact is, there’s no outside appraiser assigned to value your life. As the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross observed:
“All abundance is based on being grateful for what we have.”
…art is a currency of expression, but most of all, a currency of connection. It enriches the creator and the viewer.
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It’s why the actor Ethan Hawke frames art as essential currency for human flourishing:
“Human creativity — art — is the sustenance we need to nourish our souls… It’s the way we heal each other. In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say, ‘Hey, listen to me and I’ll listen to you,’ we’re starting a dialogue. We start to witness each other’s common humanity.”
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Rather than operating like a scarce commodity, love and kindness given away enters what some spiritual thinkers call a “loop of grace”. The more you give, the more comes back to you.
And this isn’t just a nice sentiment, as research finds even small acts of kindness (a genuine compliment, a held door, waving a car in) tends to multiply, moving not just the person who receives it but even bystanders who merely watch it to pass one along. Drop a pebble in the pond, and the ripples widen far past where it landed.
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What is it you plan to do with all your wild and precious wealth?
You’re never with nothing, you’re always carrying some kind of currency to give the world. So you’re going to have to decide. In fact, you never get not to decide. You’re spending your wealth continuously, one way or another, whether it’s the swipe of a credit card or the turn of the calendar. You might as well pour it into the things that make life worth living…
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