Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World

This is what Aristotle called Telos: the ultimate end, and reason for existence.

Every tiny facet of the world is so ridiculously fascinating that you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to notice. If you want to be interesting, be interested. Lack of intrinsic interest is a big red flag for learning any skill.

Money is just one of many precious Currencies of Life: time, health, mental bandwidth, energy, social status, hedonic pleasure, meaning.

The confusion here is that fuck-you money is not synonymous with the amount of money you need to hit financial independence or retire early.

If the French critic René Girard was still above ground, he’d explain to the confused anthropologist that among our species, the intensity of competition tells you very little about underlying value. Instead, we borrow our desires from others: a toddler will try to seize a toy which held no interest to him until his playmate wanted it—and we never

Hedonic adaptation is one of the main driving forces behind lifestyle inflation, but it’s not the only way in which our biology conspires against us. Evolution has also wired us to show off our attractiveness and social standing to our peers, even if it comes at great personal cost.

we've somehow managed to backslide from the more sophisticated understanding of the ancient Greeks: to truly love someone is to help them grow, to teach and be taught, to avoid stagnation and ruin. This means pointing out uncomfortable truths rather than sweeping them beneath the rug, and if someone is not willing to grow with us, the kindest thing

A youthful appearance is an indicator of fertility. Good health suggests strong genes. On average, tall people are slightly higher in intelligence. Of course, none of this tells you anything useful about any given individual.

Welcome to the future, babies. It's not always going to be like this, but we can expect the highs to be higher, and the lows to be lower. Which brings us to the central premise of this book: how can we position ourselves to not only survive this kind of uncertainty, but profit from it?