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What is trying to be expressed by "highest form of wealth" is usually about agency. The problem with agency, unlike what 'power' connotes you to believe; you c

What is trying to be expressed by "highest form of wealth" is usually about agency. The problem with agency, unlike what 'power' connotes you to believe; you can't just have and store it for later. Like others rightly point out in this thread, there are many avenues in life you want to be agentic but cannot solve with anything you possess, but only through becoming a required thing through transformation; examples are health, skillfulness, being understood in a relationship, an equanimous existence etc. Even then, you're to an extent up to the whims of misfortune and fortune, or if you're not allergic to that word; to fate. There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality; which connects to the original meaning of fate. But that's not even the only problem with agency; most of the time you don't even know when you have it and also when you don't have it. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapy; you either misattribute blame where it doesn't belong or fail to hold people/yourself accountable when you should; or you miss what and how you could solve a problem but instead invest your energy and emotions in an avenue that just won't work. Which means agency, capability of doing things that get you towards your real goals, whether you've realized them or not, is deeply tied to wisdom; knowing in which manner you're deceiving yourself be it through buying things instead of being things, or getting out of being confused about whose agency exactly lies where and where is the way out of an agentic entrapment. Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom.

MichaelZuo 5y ago
“To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.” - Horace
wombatmobile 5y ago
> Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom. For you, apparently, that resonates. The author contextualises his thoughts quite differently, and says something different. It may seem trivial, but to appreciate the difference, consider the first two words of this sentence from the author. > To me, the highest form of wealth is controlling your time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- acituan 5y ago
  This tries to reduce it to a scheduling problem, but reduces too much. Let's take a much simpler game than life, like chess. If the chess coach said "the most important thing is controlling your time", how sufficient would that sound as a winning strategy? Sure, time control could be important, but it doesn't really guide anyone on how to thing about the strategy and tactics. In fact, time might not even be an issue before you lose the game. Or on the flip side, if you had infinite time, you still couldn't exhaust all the combinations of movements to decide the best move. Cultivating wisdom means working on honing our "meta-heuristic" machinery, the heuristic that binds all our heuristics together, so that we are adaptively more likely to find and process the relevant information to achieve our goals in life. It has to dynamically assess the relevance of every other constraint of the game and cannot reduce the solution to a hardcoded normativity like "just control time" "just have more freedom" "just have more money".
  - hebrox 5y ago
    You mention goals twice as guiding force. It’s something that I read often, but what seems to mean different things to different people. Can you elaborate on what your goals are?
  - igammarays 5y ago
    You sound like someone who has taken John Vervaeke's classes at the University of Toronto. Are you talking about Relevance Realization?
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > This tries to reduce it to a scheduling problem, but reduces too much. I didn't read his remarks as scheduling. More like being in control of your time is being able to choose what you do, not be told what to do by someone else, or do things to please or satisfy someone else. It is a reverence for independence, which I imagine comes with or arises from wisdom, skills and wherewithal. Or luck. Whatever. What he values is freedom as much as agency.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
This comment has summed up what it has taken me decades to arrive at ("the path to enlightenment"). Thank you for posting it, and I hope others can learn from and use it to grow with less struggle than those who learned through more tumultuous and higher cost paths.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
An Uber driver once told me: “Knowledge isn’t power, application of knowledge is power.”
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Uber drivers in my experience have been very intelligent people.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    They must have been shoe shiners in a previous life.
ottomanbob 5y ago
Amazing comment. Wisdom to discern the difference between where you can be agentic and where you can't.
LB232323 5y ago
Agency is power, it's power over your own life. You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family. Most are fine with sacrificing agency in order to provide for their families and their needs in a modern society, and honestly that is a noble sacrifice. Just as in ancient times, the agency of material wealth requires the exploitation of toil.
- acituan 5y ago
  > Agency is power, it's power over your own life. Life is not something one can "power over", it is something we participate in. I say this because a good chunk of the interesting problems in life are not constraints that we can power over with willful motion, nor predict or prepare for. In fact it is so common to see people who are stuck in their attempts of willful assertion over things they can't change but can't also see that fact. Others are lost in expending majority of their resources in preparation for eventualities that probably will never come but are still scary for them. Those are examples to modes of loss of agency due to misapplication of power. In contrast to power, agency also necessitates finessing your way through obstacles and uncertainties when appropriate, in addition to having influence over your environment and conditions. A mini version of this can be found in an analogy of boxing; punching can't be the only thing in your repertoire, you also need footwork, evasion, blocking. It requires synchrony with your opponent, you constantly adapting to it and influencing it. You can't "power" your way to victory, you have to do all of those things in appropriate configuration to get a chance at it, and even then you might not win. > You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family. There are two potential problems with this. Firstly, rationally speaking one would has to sacrifice time for the exact amount of wealth they will require for these goals, and not a dime more, because overworking would just be another way of losing your agency. Not only this equilibrium point is hard to predict, most people are already stuck in wanting the more of it than calculating an approximation of the enough of it. The second problem is, material wealth is by far not the only input to raising a happy, good family. What kind of a person you need to become to be a good enough parent, is a much more difficult proposition than how much money you need to have to send them to what college. This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things. And this inevitably causes losses in agency; as evidenced with many families that had it "all" and still came apart.
RandomLensman 5y ago
The usual way to true agency in the current society is lots of money, so that problems don't need to reach you, ie have people for it, don't care what it costs to fix something etc. Doesn't buy you individual health or invulnerability (on average it kind of does, or at least improves vs some demographics(.
live4ever 5y ago
"There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality" - I have always been a supporter of the 'living forever' argument and research - your comment here has made me appreciate that they really and truly are working on the one goal that matters.
838812052807016 5y ago
So it seems that honest self-examination is one essential ingredient. Then based on this examination, one must take action and interact with the world, perhaps face fears. From this interaction with your surroundings, you gain insight and experience. You are changed. Repeat. What do you think?

MichaelZuo 5y ago

“To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.” - Horace

wombatmobile 5y ago

> Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom. For you, apparently, that resonates. The author contextualises his thoughts quite differently, and says something different. It may seem trivial, but to appreciate the difference, consider the first two words of this sentence from the author. > To me, the highest form of wealth is controlling your time.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
acituan 5y ago
This tries to reduce it to a scheduling problem, but reduces too much. Let's take a much simpler game than life, like chess. If the chess coach said "the most important thing is controlling your time", how sufficient would that sound as a winning strategy? Sure, time control could be important, but it doesn't really guide anyone on how to thing about the strategy and tactics. In fact, time might not even be an issue before you lose the game. Or on the flip side, if you had infinite time, you still couldn't exhaust all the combinations of movements to decide the best move. Cultivating wisdom means working on honing our "meta-heuristic" machinery, the heuristic that binds all our heuristics together, so that we are adaptively more likely to find and process the relevant information to achieve our goals in life. It has to dynamically assess the relevance of every other constraint of the game and cannot reduce the solution to a hardcoded normativity like "just control time" "just have more freedom" "just have more money".
- hebrox 5y ago
  You mention goals twice as guiding force. It’s something that I read often, but what seems to mean different things to different people. Can you elaborate on what your goals are?
- igammarays 5y ago
  You sound like someone who has taken John Vervaeke's classes at the University of Toronto. Are you talking about Relevance Realization?
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > This tries to reduce it to a scheduling problem, but reduces too much. I didn't read his remarks as scheduling. More like being in control of your time is being able to choose what you do, not be told what to do by someone else, or do things to please or satisfy someone else. It is a reverence for independence, which I imagine comes with or arises from wisdom, skills and wherewithal. Or luck. Whatever. What he values is freedom as much as agency.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

This comment has summed up what it has taken me decades to arrive at ("the path to enlightenment"). Thank you for posting it, and I hope others can learn from and use it to grow with less struggle than those who learned through more tumultuous and higher cost paths.

r3trohack3r 5y ago

An Uber driver once told me: “Knowledge isn’t power, application of knowledge is power.”

quickthrower2 5y ago
Uber drivers in my experience have been very intelligent people.
- the-dude 5y ago
  They must have been shoe shiners in a previous life.

ottomanbob 5y ago

Amazing comment. Wisdom to discern the difference between where you can be agentic and where you can't.

LB232323 5y ago

Agency is power, it's power over your own life. You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family. Most are fine with sacrificing agency in order to provide for their families and their needs in a modern society, and honestly that is a noble sacrifice. Just as in ancient times, the agency of material wealth requires the exploitation of toil.

acituan 5y ago
> Agency is power, it's power over your own life. Life is not something one can "power over", it is something we participate in. I say this because a good chunk of the interesting problems in life are not constraints that we can power over with willful motion, nor predict or prepare for. In fact it is so common to see people who are stuck in their attempts of willful assertion over things they can't change but can't also see that fact. Others are lost in expending majority of their resources in preparation for eventualities that probably will never come but are still scary for them. Those are examples to modes of loss of agency due to misapplication of power. In contrast to power, agency also necessitates finessing your way through obstacles and uncertainties when appropriate, in addition to having influence over your environment and conditions. A mini version of this can be found in an analogy of boxing; punching can't be the only thing in your repertoire, you also need footwork, evasion, blocking. It requires synchrony with your opponent, you constantly adapting to it and influencing it. You can't "power" your way to victory, you have to do all of those things in appropriate configuration to get a chance at it, and even then you might not win. > You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family. There are two potential problems with this. Firstly, rationally speaking one would has to sacrifice time for the exact amount of wealth they will require for these goals, and not a dime more, because overworking would just be another way of losing your agency. Not only this equilibrium point is hard to predict, most people are already stuck in wanting the more of it than calculating an approximation of the enough of it. The second problem is, material wealth is by far not the only input to raising a happy, good family. What kind of a person you need to become to be a good enough parent, is a much more difficult proposition than how much money you need to have to send them to what college. This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things. And this inevitably causes losses in agency; as evidenced with many families that had it "all" and still came apart.

RandomLensman 5y ago

The usual way to true agency in the current society is lots of money, so that problems don't need to reach you, ie have people for it, don't care what it costs to fix something etc. Doesn't buy you individual health or invulnerability (on average it kind of does, or at least improves vs some demographics(.

live4ever 5y ago

"There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality" - I have always been a supporter of the 'living forever' argument and research - your comment here has made me appreciate that they really and truly are working on the one goal that matters.

838812052807016 5y ago

So it seems that honest self-examination is one essential ingredient. Then based on this examination, one must take action and interact with the world, perhaps face fears. From this interaction with your surroundings, you gain insight and experience. You are changed. Repeat. What do you think?