Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World

We’re not in here to eat mozzarella and go to Tuscany. We’re not in here to accumulate money. We’re in here mostly to sacrifice, to do something. The way you do it is by taking risks. Nassim Taleb

I am motivated by harder currencies: money, time, health, and pleasure. If you can find a way to align your own self-interest with the interests of other people and the interests of the planet as a whole, you get a beautiful outcome. This is the idea of selfish selflessness: with the right incentive structure, there's no need for sermons and shamin

We're a long way from post-scarcity, which means conspicuous consumption is still a reliable signal across many parts of the world, and in lower socioeconomic groups within rich countries. But it is weakening relative to other signals, especially among the type of people likely to be reading this book, and this trend will continue. As money becomes

As for concerns around overpopulation, historically, these fears have been completely backwards. Every time, it's education, technology and innovation that lifts us out of poverty and saves us from imminent apocalypse, while population controls and 'de-growth' initiatives lead to stomach-churning atrocities.

In the language of optionality: having first opened as many options as possible, and secondly, exploited those that are most useful, then, give them away. This order is important. Without a buffer of optionality to protect against shocks in your own life and open up opportunities, you have no ability to take risks.

After a certain point, the only people still playing the conspicuous consumption game will be those for whom it is still a useful signal—lower socioeconomic groups, people in developing countries—and those who don't have other dimensions on which they're able to compete. In other words, it will quite literally be a poor man's game.

The Matthew effect is still widely underappreciated today, not only for its strength, but its sheer pervasiveness: financial inequality, academic citations, scientific discoveries, early childhood education, investing, poverty, fame, popularity, physical fitness, market pricing, and beauty are all governed by the principle of cumulative (dis)advant

The Hindu Vedas distinguish between one's true self (Ātman) and the transcendent self (Brahman). A person can only be liberated when they realise that their true self is indistinguishable from the single binding unity of reality, and that there is no difference between 'I' and 'you' and 'her'—in other words, that Ātman and Brahman are one and the s

status is necessarily nebulous, it's much less of an abstraction than money. This is the basic currency of social animals: it can be traded, saved, invested, loaned out, or crystallised. Unlike health or knowledge capital, status is liquid—it can be readily exchanged for sex, information, money, or other favours.