This week I’m attending a meditation retreat in Costa Rica and in conversations with some older participants one thing that is becoming clear is that most of them wish they had practiced meditation earlier in their lives.
Why is that?
I believe it’s because there is no more important practice in life than becoming intimate with consciousness and experience.
Most of us think we can get what we want first… and then be happy.
That’s not how life works. If you are not a person that knows how to live a meaningful and fulfilled life now, money and success are not suddenly going to make you one.
On the contrary. If you have had to compromise your health, integrity and relationships in order to become successful, these capacities are awfully hard to restore later in life.
And if these capacities are compromised, familiarizing yourself with consciousness increasingly becomes an uphill battle.
What’s the price of #Bitcoin at which governments will step in one way or another?
Make no mistake, they can’t just let BTC go to 500k let alone higher.
Not one word from the Financial Times about the recent Bitcoin rally… shameful
It’s not what you think!
Sometimes we fall in love with music in a moment of susceptibility and it’s less the music and more the momentary susceptibility that’s responsible.
But when I heard Nothing Matters by British band Last Dinner Party for the first time, I immediately felt that this was music that stood out from the mediocre sludge our ears are mostly exposed to these days.
Now, I admit that my potential bias was unveiled soon after, when I read that Last Dinner Party works with James Ford the go-to producer of my favorite band Arctic Monkeys.
And yet, there is something new here: Last Dinner Party to me sound like a baroque blend of Queen, Abba and Arctic Monkeys with a pinch of feminist lyrics that somehow manage to charm rather than alienate the listener.
Later I found out that I was far from the only one who had heard something special: Last Dinner Party’s star is already on the rise, having been voted BBC Sound of the Year 2024 amongst other honours.
A lot more to come.
A famous Zen mantra is that you ought to practice “as if your hair is on fire”. The hope, of course, is to instill a sense of urgency in the student.
However, there is an insight here as well: Meditators including myself often think that they first need to accumulate a certain number of hours of practice before earning enlightenment.
This is not how meditation works. While practice can help improve concentration, it’s not what is actually needed for deeper consciousness. Deeper consciousness arises through true openness and intent.
Openness and intent are not practiced, they are qualities that are either here in this very moment or they are not.
If there is no urgency, we divert our attention to distractions and fantasies. If the house is on fire, we will try to save some parts of ourselves. If our hair is on fire, there is nothing left to save and all attention is on the project at hand.
I’m sitting in Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and there’s a couple next to me debating about the trajectory of interest rates. They look like pretty normal people.
Normal people are not supposed to have to talk about interest rates on a Friday evening as they’re heading into their weekend together. Nay, they are not supposed to have to talk about interest rates at all.
And yet our central bank is now forcing anyone who would like their savings to be protected to care about the yield curve and outcomes from the FOMC meeting.
Think about the absurdity of this for a second. It’s the reason why Elon Musk feels compelled to post tweets like this on a Friday afternoon:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1760852068246729190?s=20
There’s a brighter future ahead.
Low Time Preference
Time preference is an economic term to describe the relative value of consuming a good or service today vs. in the future. A high time preference means that a large discount is placed on future consumption and therefore very little consumption is delayed.
One primary mediator of time preference is interest rates. The lower interest rates are the less we’re incentivized to delay consumption. Other mediators can be economic uncertainty or a society’s age.
Despite recent increases in interest rates we still live in a time of historically low rates. The result is a historically high time preference.
This is part of the reason why our society doesn’t value time. We are infamous for overconsumption, procrastination and indebtedness.
We over-consume because we don’t know whether our money will still allow us to consume the same amount in the future.
We procrastinate because it’s not clear that delayed gratification will pay off.
We indebt ourselves because debt is the only way to create economic value quickly enough to counterbalance monetary inflation.
If you are my age, it’s hard to remember a world of low time preference. A world where there were no obese people, where the products we bought were made to last, where leverage was not worn as a badge of honor.
I post here daily:
https://soirbleu.medium.com/low-time-preference-fe355efe1c91The Tibetan word for meditation translates roughly to “familiarize”. The project of meditation is not to achieve a certain blissful state. It’s to become conscious of our true nature and to then familiarize ourselves with it.
Usually the meditator, even if he has reached enlightenment, will still encounter situations or emotions that will trigger contraction and confusion, leading to suffering.
Familiarization allows him increasingly to avoid such regression. My teacher Loch Kelly uses the mantra: “train to remain and learn to return” to instill this intentionality in his students.
We walk around life with a solid and relatively continuous identity. This allows us to interact effectively with others and with our environment. I suspect that it is for this reason that we categorize as disorders patterns where an individual changes their identity frequently and dramatically.
Sometimes in life, the identity we have formed is increasingly less compatible with others and or a new environment it finds itself in. This causes suffering for the individual.
We typically seek self-help books or therapy to find out why this discrepancy is occuring.
Another approach is mindfulness or contemplation. These are methods where we step away from our intellectual problem solving mind and instead create space for new understanding to arise.
The space created through these practices allows our identity to shift into a more aligned configuration.
Often, after longer meditation retreats, I have experienced that slow but noticeable shifts in my identity occurred as space was created.
Peter Ralston calls this the lava syndrome: As the volcanic rock of our identities is heated up it is allowed to reshape itself. Later, as life cool down, a new identity is set in stone, hopefully aligned with a more fulfilling life.
There has been a lot of talk about
@Wallet of Satoshi 's "rug-pull".
While I didn't like the lack of communication from WoS when they were kicked from the Appstore I just wanted to say that upon reaching out they just fully restored a wallet with >$100 in it... despite limited information I could provide about my wallet.
Make sure you reach out to them if you still have money stuck in a wallet with them.
I remember listening to Sam Bankman Fried’s interview with Tyler Cowen in March of 2022. The conversation inevitably moved from his growing crypto empire to his efforts in the realm of effective altruism (EA) - I became increasingly suspicious of SBF as a result.
EA is a movement rooted in the philosophy of utilitarianism with the goal of using evidence and reason to figure out how to help others in the most effective way possible - usually through philanthropy and charity.
The promise of EA is seductive: why shouldn’t we use objective standards and rational measures to compare and weigh the impact of philanthropic efforts against each other?
To an extent we should. However, doing good is not just a matter of What but at least to an equal degree a matter of How. I deeply believe that a friendly interaction with a fellow human at the train station can have a greater ripple effect than a large sum of money dispassionately allocated to the right cause.
EA’s focus on the What is symptomatic of our very cerebral approach to most things. It is missing the importance of the spiritual component of human interaction. Homeless people in our western world rarely have a true shortage of material necessities. What they really need is to be treated like equal human beings again so that they can then satisfy their material needs through their own means.
The fact that SBF was able to rationalize giving away stolen money through the framework of Effective Altruism, and was celebrated for it without any second thoughts says a lot about the awkwardness of this movement.
Intellectually understanding a habit does not help us adopt or remove it and yet 99% of the time that is how we approach it.
Removing a bad habit or an addiction is only possible if we have a visceral insight and understanding of why we keep repeating the behavior. Usually we repeat it, because it is serving us in some way.
The starting point therefore is to find out how the habit is serving us. In the case of smoking it may be that we’ve grown accustomed to the soothing effect of both nicotine and of stepping away from work or social interactions.
Subsequently, we delve into the underlying reasons for our constant need for solace. What is it about our circumstance, environment or relationships that contributes to the perpetual need to be pacified?
As we go down this rabbit hole we typically arrive at some deep-seated existential assumptions. These are assumptions that we make about ourselves that are so deeply rooted that we’re usually not aware we’re constantly making them. It may be something like: “I’m not good enough” or “I can’t connect with others”.
Often when we reach such an existential assumption, we experience a sense of liberation or catharsis. This is because our body may have been in a constant physical holding pattern to match the mental construct. Now that the assumption has been recognized for what it is, this pattern can be let go of.
Don’t get me wrong, this path is far from easy. It is, however a powerful and empowering approach vis à vis the convenient excuse of a chemical addiction.
"The bowhead whale gets up to 200 years old not because it is great at going to its cancer pre-screenings. It gets this old because that is optimal for this particular species within its ecological niche at this juncture in time."
https://soirbleu.medium.com/death-is-not-a-bug-its-a-feature-6ca8dd555652
What is money? In the wise words of G.L.S. Shackle:
“Money is the refuge from specialized commitment, the postponer of the need to take far-reaching decisions”
In other words, in a time where there are no good opportunities to invest, money is supposed to protect us from having to make as “specialized a commitment” as an investment. It does this by acting as a store of value.
Many individuals and companies are currently using this property of money to postpone investment decisions, hoping for better opportunities in the future.
One notable example of this is Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s investment conglomerate and one of the biggest public companies in the world. Berkshire currently holds about $150 Billion in cash. Buffet, of course is known for value investing, i.e. looking for companies and assets that are significantly undervalued.
From the size of Berkshire’s cash pile you can deduce that Buffet is currently convinced that a significant portion of the market is overvalued and that he’s therefore making use of Shackle’s money definition to postpone any far-reaching decisions.
While Buffet is correct that most assets today are overvalued, he is wrong about the second part of his equation: The problem is that the cash he is hoarding is no longer satisfying the requirement of acting as a store of value. The Dollar, Euro, Yen and most other currencies are losing value quickly and this trend is only going to accelerate as government debts pile up.
In the words of Ray Dalio “cash is trash”.
It is understandable that Buffet is getting this wrong because he grew up and celebrated his successes in a monetary paradigm of limited inflation and moderate government debts.
The only true form of money that can still act as Shackle’s “postponer of the need to take far-reaching decisions” is Bitcoin, which is scarce and not influenced by government debt.
Famously Buffet has called Bitcoin “rat poison squared”. This is because he is thinking of Bitcoin as an investment. However, Bitcoin is not an investment. It is cash, the only real form of it.
Buffet likes cash. Once he understands that’s what Bitcoin is, he’ll start coming around like many other famous investors before him.
“Money is the refuge from specialized commitment, the postponer of the need to take far-reaching decisions” - G.L.S. Shackle
https://medium.com/@soirbleu/why-warren-buffet-is-wrong-about-money-ebc060692290"When we’re sick, our knee jerk reaction is to obtain an expert diagnosis and to respond with a targeted prescription. We entrust our lives to this simple paradigm. What could possibly go wrong?..."
https://soirbleu.medium.com/the-fragile-paradigm-of-western-medicine-3dc5040335abHas anyone here thought about use cases for the Bitcoin ledger in agriculture?
