ThinkOfThe.Money
A particularly good piece titled “Time” from Applied Divinity Studies: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/time/.
It combines two themes that are relatively commonplace elsewhere, but both of which deserve more attention in their own right. Together they make quite an interesting combination.
The first theme is the less interesting of the two, which is the power of compound interest. This is of course very powerful and something which we should all try to harness. It should probably be seen as fundamental life knowledge, hence it perhaps seeming less insightful if you tend to read this type of advice more often.
The description of the power of compound interest is also reminiscent of James Clear’s observation that time can be either an ally or an enemy, depending on your habits and the systems you participate in:
“This is the norm, but it doesn’t have to be. Consider putting your money in a high-yield savings account. As you sleep, you are earning money. Were you to sleep in an extra hour, that would not be an hour wasted, but an hour to accrue more compound interest. Were you, like Fry from Futurama, to fall into a coma for 1,000 years, you could wake up a billionaire. Time is working for you.”
The post acknowledges that pointing out the power of compound interest is possibly only a minor point in a larger and more important idea:
“Finance is the most obvious example, but it’s not an isolated case. Lots of things grow and compound, far beyond the effort you put into them. If you plant an apple tree today, you’ll be greeted years from now with a bountiful harvest.”
This gets at something that is more interesting about the world of finance in particular and many other fields more generally. It might be described as “metaphor made real”. Nothing in finance is objectively real in a simple sense – it is all abstraction and metaphor built on top of human desires and interactions. But it achieves something fascinating by seeming to be able to create something objective using only subjective building blocks.
By the end of the post, we are on to stoic life philosophy:
“You can also choose to simply live atemporally. To understand that you have already died, will always have died, and all that’s happening here is your experience through the temporal axis of your own life.”
There is some potential “mind over matter” power here, except that it’s “mind over time” (in more sense than one). Ironically this can be either comforting or irritating depending on your frame of mind.