You Are As Old As You Feel; And As Rich As You Give

Quite recently, there was a headline doing the rounds that Bill Gates will be giving away 99% of his wealth over the next 20 years. As paradoxical as it may sound, this would mean that Bill Gates is finally rich. Let me explain.

One thing that unifies us as human beings is our universal individual search for meaning… for a purpose, our specific purpose, our raison d’etre, why we exist, why we were made, or rather born, and put in this world at this specific time and in this specific place. Sometimes, when all is quiet, this question pops into our head, but for the most part, it lives rescinded beneath our conscious mind, and in its place we feel a lingering sort of unease—the so-called existential angst. Only when we do something that we truly feel we were meant to do does it ever go away, and in those moments, we feel truly alive, fulfilled even. We feel like we are who we think we are, or are becoming who we are meant to be; like we are in the right place, at the right time, doing exactly what we were meant to be doing. It’s one of the most profound feelings we can ever have. Its memory sustains us by defining, strengthening and sharpening the image we have of ourselves.

The most direct path to this experience is through our work. The problem is that most of us don’t do the work we feel we were meant to do, most of the time. A large part of this is because we work to get the money we need to survive. This dynamic creates a false sense of purpose that can temporarily overpower our existential angst. Survival mode gives you clear external problems (bills, landlords, business/work competitors, e.t.c, ), simple goals and a sense of direction. Also, you get all the happy chemicals when you hit your milestones, which can be a good enough temporary substitute for actual fulfillment.

Two problems. While this may quieten your existential angst, it doesn’t replace your fundamental search for true meaning. Your existential angst will grown louder and louder and you will find yourself looking for outlets for self-expression. Second, this sense of ‘purpose’ is reactive—it depends on external things. You are driven by necessity and whatever is urgent. Suppose one day you make it, you succeed. You will be in grave danger of suddenly and quite unexpectedly falling apart since there are no urgent bills, no external goals, no fires to vanquish, nothing to push you to achieve something, anything. In the past, any time you came close to success, you probably self-sabotaged because your subconscious correctly predicted this state.

The problem with being rich is that you have to grasp harder at meaning since you don’t have the distractions that comes with survival mode. Survival mode affords our psychology a lot of shortcuts. For example, if you do a shoddy job, you can blame it on something that stood in your way. Urgent bills pushed you to do what you needed to do to survive, under normal circumstances, you would have done a much better job, you tell yourself. When you are rich, you don’t have the luxury of such an excuse. A bad job stares you in the face and scoffs at you. You feel more like a failure when you fail at stuff. After all, being rich means you are resourceful, so you really have no excuses. That means you have to work harder, much harder than you would have if you were merely on survival mode. It’s not just longer hours, and more sweat. It’s doing everything you can to uncover insights that help solve a particular problem. The kind of hard work you do is the kind that brings you face to face with yourself. Another problem you have is that since necessity and lack of money are no longer there to give you guardrails, you have no choice but to develop self-discipline. This often happens naturally because you quickly realize how badly you fall apart when there are no guardrails, and discipline is the only guardrail you can have when you are rich. That and your morals.

The funny thing is that at this stage, you are working harder and are more self-disciplined, which results in more and more success. This is one of the reasons rich people keep getting richer. Some of it is because of how finance works—you have more capital, for starters—but some of it is simply the result of this self-reinforcing dynamic. At this stage, most rich people realize that they can do anything but create time. They also realize that health is the one thing they cannot fully control. Most become obsessed with fitness, and some even try to find ways to live longer. But other than that, their search for meaning manifests as a strong drive to leave their mark in the world. To have an impact by doing something truly great for humanity. You will often find rich people at this stage working on projects they believe are ‘important for humanity’, whatever that means for them, even if such projects are not financially successful.

Over time, you start to discover that the biggest impact you have to society is when you give. It doesn’t have to be money. It can be your time, your knowledge, your influence, lending your reputation; whatever you have that helps a situation. The change that happens is that before, you packaged whatever you gave society into products and you benefited materially from it. And while your products may have been useful or entertaining or even much needed by society, they didn’t have as large an emotional impact on people. You quickly learn that generosity has the bigger emotional impact, and it rewards you too emotionally in ways that are more profound than material rewards. Also, the fulfillment you experience from being generous trumps any fulfillment you experience through creative acts.

The funny thing about richness is that when you are not rich, you think that being rich must be really amazing. The reality is of course different. Not to say being rich isn’t awesome, it’s just not as awesome as many people think it is. That amazing feeling most people associate with being rich is something you only feel when you are generous with your money. Why only money? While you can be generous in many ways, many rich people discover that they are in a unique position to give more than anyone else, and that their generosity can have a profound emotional impact on others and on themselves. Furthermore, when you are generous with anything other than money, you rarely feel properly appreciated. So the emotional reward of other forms of generosity are not usually as strong. It can feel so good to give away your money, that you want to give as much of it as possible. Giving makes you feel rich because it is the one time you can feel the effect of your money. In this sense, in the same way you are as old as you feel, you are as rich as you are generous.

You don’t have to wait until you have a lot of money to experience this. Start by being more generous with your friends and loved ones. If you are particularly stingy, it’s going to be difficult at first, but you have to push through your initial resistance. Part of the reason you are stingy could be that you are afraid of opening up your heart and experiencing something profound. Generosity also pours water on our egos so your initial resistance could be an ego defense.

This quote is kind of related to this post somehow I think but anyway I like it so here…

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Paul Graham on good writing [Link]