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Wednesday, March 09, 2016

"Invest your time in furthering your own education, health, and meaningful relationships..."


Why We are Not Really All Doomed: "Yes, that’s all there is to it. It is bold, cheesy, simplistic and contains some profanity just to let you know I really mean it. Yet it is oddly similar to the wisdom Warren Buffett just repeated in this year’s annual letter to shareholders. In that classic, he compares market crashes and financial crises to a mouthy neighbor shouting his estimate of your farm’s value over the fence at you, while you are busy producing food from the land and the sunshine. Humankind’s ability to live well and prosper depends at its core only on productive land, sunshine and our collective knowledge. While the first item on the list is currently under some attack, the second comes with a billion-year guarantee and the third is increasing so rapidly that it should easily be able to correct our current failures in the land department. In fact, this whole website is one tiny contribution towards that correction – a chunk of human knowledge that grows over time and helps to solve an existing problem...

In less fluffy and metaphorical terms, this means: Invest your money in index funds and real estate rather than “protecting” it while trying to predict the next collapse. You’ll still own your piece of land or your slice of thousands of businesses regardless of what the guy on the fence is yelling about what he would pay for it at the moment. Invest your time in furthering your own education, health, and meaningful relationships, rather than drowning in worry, consuming passive entertainment, or protecting yourself from failure. Produce value for the world much more than you consume things from the world. Producing is a happier activity, and the inevitable money surplus caused by this habit will allow you to capitalize on, rather than being crushed by, fluctuations in the general upward trend of those first two tips."

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