✍🏽 Write your own part

Here are a few quotes that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: “[…] Write your own part.

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Hi,

Here are a few quotes that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:

“[…] Write your own part. It is the only way I’ve gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It forces you to think about what your strengths really are, and once you find them, you can showcase them, and no one can stop you.” - Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns)

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” - Graffiti in Echo Park on the sidewalk

And a reminder from Finance for the People: “To accept yourself when other people don’t is kind of the ultimate fuck you.”

Your friend,

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad

1. 🚫 Lifestyle creep: What is it and how to avoid the seductive thrill of spending (NPR Life Kit) I spoke with the Ruth Tam about the hedonic treadmill and the emotions around spending

2. 💲 The Dollar Is Extremely Strong, Pushing Down the World (New York Times)

3. 🚶‍♂️ The Last Fad of the Crypto Bubble (Intelligencer) Making money by walking seemed too easy. I fell for it anyway.

4. 🥴 Sick and struggling to pay, 100 million people in the U.S. live with medical debt (NPR) "Debt is no longer just a bug in our system. We have a health care system almost perfectly designed to create debt.”

5. 🤓 A bookkeeping thing - I spoke to someone who had been in business for almost ten years and they casually asked me what the point of bookkeeping was. I was shook, so here’s this from Ali the CFO: How to Understand Accounting

6. 😨 The Anxiety of Influencers (Harpers) “If we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.”

7. 👨‍🏫 Crypto believers insist this is all worth it. Is it? (Vox) “It’s also worth contemplating whether we want to live in the super-financialized world some people in the Web3 space envision, where every little bit of information and content is something to be paid for and valued at an individual level. What the internet has been so remarkable in accomplishing is eliminating the scarcity of information and making it accessible to everyone for free. ‘We’ve come full circle, to ‘let’s take things that are free and lock them behind cryptographic solutions and charge people for them and … make digital things that could be available to everyone ownable by someone.’”

8. 🎮 Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist. (Vanity Fair) “It’s fair to assume most humans have played a video game—the emotional capital of playing and loving a game 30 years ago is one of the reasons games that old have become desirable. In the summer of 2021, a sealed copy of the first print of Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold for $2 million at auction. A copy of The Legend of Zelda went for nearly $900,000. A pristine, never-opened copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million. People started buying pieces of games, shares of them, one hundredth of a title, as an investment. The zone is much less like the techno-hype surrounding NFTs (Christie’s sold one of those last year for $69 million) and far more akin to fine art.”

Today I learned about Captain Samuel Vimes' ‘Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. It’s from Terry Pratchett’s novel Men at Arms.⁠ ⁠ “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.⁠ ⁠ Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.⁠ ⁠ But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.⁠ ⁠ This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”⁠ ⁠ #financefriend #todayilearned #til

@thehellyeahgroup

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