Posts
A few weeks ago, I fell asleep on my morning commute.
Let me get back to that.
Via Scott, a substack post for men (by a woman) on when/whether to marry their girlfriends. The advice is mostly unobjectionable and mostly obvious, but this section arrested my attention:
The last question is how short is life. How much do you value the next few years of your life, when you could either be married to your current partner or on the prowl for a new one, compared to the future span of your marriage?
Given AI timelines, I think the expected length of your marriage if you get married today is probably something like ten years.12 Even if you want to set that aside,13 I’m skeptical you should think of the remainder of your natural life as worth fifty or sixty times as much as the next year. You probably have some intrinsic time preference (you-in-fifty-years is much less “you” than you-next-year) and you should discount the future to some extent because of uncertainty.14
I’ve tended to think of a normal lifespan as being worth about thirty times as much as next year. That means if it takes three years to find another partner, you’ve spent 10% of the rest of your life searching. This, combined with the investment benefit — which I think could easily be 10% or more over a ten year marriage — means that you need to find someone who’s better than your current partner by a pretty healthy margin to be worth the wait.
Anyone with an education in economics or finance understands the principle of the discount rate with respect to money -- a dollar now is worth more than a dollar in the future -- but the above passage made me think about the discount rate of time itself. This has become particularly salient for me personally, not in terms of relationships -- I've had that problem satisfactorily solved for 30 years already -- but in view of the fact that 30 years is realistically the outside limit of my remaining life. Of that 30 years, the next 10 is going to be worth more than the 10 after that, and the years beyond are, judging from what I have seen, likely to involve . . . net negative utility.
What to do . . . .
I have previously described having my "dream job", and this is still true, but it is conditioned on a world where I need to work for wages. (Mostly; more on this later.) But does that condition still hold?
I was watching a podcast interview, probably Chris Williamson, on financial compatibility in relationships.* The interviewee described a person's relationship with money as existing between two poles. At one pole, money is about freedom, and therefore only actualized in the spending of it. At the other pole, money is about security, and thus should be maximally saved. His point was that two people in a relationship should not be too far apart on this axis.
Not going into the details, my rough estimate of the contribution of my expected wages between now and "full retirement age" to my overall financial position is about +25%. It's less than that percentage taking into account potential Social Security payments, though those are a few years away (and also assumes the program will still exist). Not counting my chickens, etc., it's a lot less taking into account expected inheritances, though those are even more years away. But let's use +25% as a ballpark. What does that buy me?
Freedom (spending): I can't translate +25% into a meaningful lifestyle change a decade from now on any measure that I actually cared about. Sure, I could do things. I could buy a boat, but I don't want a boat. I could buy a bigger house, but I don't want a bigger house. (I don't even want to have to fuss with the house I'm actually living in.) I could start flying again . . . okay, this is something I would do, but let's be realistic: I already don't have the energy to work my job full time and also put in the effort required to get current again. In 10 years, I may not have the energy in any circumstances. The time now is worth more than the time then.
Security (saving): My wife and I don't face risks beyond the common ones. One or both of us could require premature long term care. Money obviously helps with this, but "long term" in 10 years will be . . . 10 fewer years long than it would be now. We also face the common risk of systemic failure, but again I'm not sure how to mitigate this risk in ways I would actually execute on. I'm already doing very little to prepare for a financial/governmental/social collapse beyond what I'm doing for other reasons anyway. +25% would probably not change this.
And that +25% isn't free! It will cost me something between:
the best 10 years of my remaining life; and
dying in a car crash because I fell asleep driving to work!
That last one looks to me pretty stoopid.
But that said, there are other considerations:
We have local medium- to long-term commitments that keep us in our current location. As my wife put it, we can go away for 2-3 weeks, but we'll need to get back after that. So we can't just go touring the country in an RV for months at a time. That's something we both think sounds appealing, but we can't yet.
My current location is expensive. Mostly this is taxes, partly the size and age of our house. We both want to work out moving south for the warmer winter climate (we already have a summer house) and the lower taxes, but we can't yet.
My financial situation is good given our current lifestyle, but I'm not quite comfortable enough to quit work and take on an expensive hobby like tooling around in an RV. There is a money/freedom tradeoff curve somewhere.
In a world where nothing else changes -- I'm living in my current expensive situation and I have no new activities -- except that the time I currently spend working I then spend at home napping, doom scrolling, and pestering my hot wife for s*x. I'm not sure that this will be good for my well-being in even the medium term.
Hanging over all of this is that I'm bad at making these kind of decisions absent an external requirement. In a sense, I haven't made a career decision since joining ROTC 40 years ago. After that, the USAF told me where to live and what to do, and I didn't leave until I had to. I then took the first job offer I received, and I didn't leave until the vaccine mandate forced me to. I then took the first job offer I received, and here I am. Quitting would be a big deal.
Until something changes, it looks it will have to be a fatal car crash. Wish me luck!
* I consume far more "relationship" content than my marital status would predict. I may have unresolved issues . . . .
