A Satisfied Mind

Wednesday, March 18th. 3:34 at night.I woke up intermittently, and I think the reason for waking this time was purely that I needed to use the restroom. A good indication that it wasn’t something else. It might have been triggered by something else, but most probably that was it, as I’m now awake and I don’t feel the intense symptoms I’ve felt ever since starting my journey toward recovery from the last compression arc with aggressive treatment.And tonight I’m not going to retell a dream to the best of my ability. I don’t remember if I was dreaming right before waking.However, as is often the case, right after I wake up—whether in the middle of the night or in the morning—my brain suddenly gets jacked into the socket and starts associating.It is often in the middle of the night or in the morning that my brain is at its freest when it comes to association. It jumps between different concepts, from one idea to another that is related in some aspect, but these associations can come and go very fast. So sometimes it is hard for me to backtrack the chain of associations that originally led me to one concept rather than another.So I cannot fully source where this image came from, but an image came into my mind of someone buying a lottery ticket. And not just any lottery ticket, but what in Swedish is called a Trisslott.The Triss ticket is basically a gamified version of the general lottery that you see in many countries, where there is a long number drawn every week or so, and anyone can buy one or several tickets. What they get is one number with a fixed number of digits. Then, upon the weekly draw, people compare their own number to the centrally drawn winning number. If your number matches, you win the jackpot, which can be a very large sum of money.But according to game theory and statistics, you should never play these kinds of lotteries, because your expected return is normally half of what you put in.So if you bet 100 kronor or 100 euros, your expected return is 50 euros. But you already invested 100 euros, so you have lost half of what you invested.And this is obviously not a good investment.Lottery Tickets and Childhood ConditioningThat made me think about how my own relationship to lottery tickets was formed at a quite early age.And I’m lucky that I was able to realize early enough that this is not a good strategy for earning money.But it is a fact—it is the state of the nation in Sweden—that a lot of families buy similar kinds of lottery tickets, though even more gamified ones.Imagine that you come home with a small ticket, handy enough for a child to hold in their hand, and it has a grid on it. I don’t remember exactly how many fields there are, which is probably a good sign. Maybe it is three by four, or three by three, or even four by four. In each field you can reveal an amount that you might win.You can get 25 kronor, which is the original price tag of the ticket itself, unless they have raised it since I last paid attention to these things, and all the way up to a million kronor or more. Divide that by ten and you roughly get the euro amount.But that is just one number shown in one field. In order to win anything, you need three of the same amounts. So if you scratch off three fields that all say 25 kronor, your win is 25 kronor. If you get 50 kronor three times on the same ticket, then your win is 50 kronor minus the 25 kronor you spent on the ticket.But obviously this is just the same setup as the national lottery. Your expected return is still half of what it costs you to buy the ticket.So you shouldn’t do it.And yet a lot of kids in Sweden are most probably brought up seeing these lottery tickets, and they are often introduced at some of the most psychologically vulnerable moments in a child’s development—moments related to gifting, money, value, and reward.Because if you are gifting lottery tickets to a child, irrespective of the setting, the signal you are sending is that the availability of money in a person’s life is conditioned upon luck. Not upon effort, or skill, or ambition.And those things can be problematic too, obviously. Because as I once heard in that lovely song later covered by Jeff Buckley, A Satisfied Mind:“How many times have you heard someone say, if I had money, I would do things my way. But little they know that it’s so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.”That was paraphrased a bit, because I missed part of the lyric, but the point stands.As most people know, just because you have money does not mean you are satisfied with your life or your life choices.But having money is still a good thing, all other things equal. It is good to be resourceful. You do not need to accumulate money for all eternity. You can do that until a certain point, and then shift your focus toward other things in life. But if you always feel that money is scarce, you may end up making life choices based mainly on financial concerns rather than on the things that are more fundamentally important to you as a person, and more central to making life feel rich.To be able to express yourself. To realize yourself.Luck as a False North StarComing back to the theme of lottery tickets: I think it is a f*****g deprivation. It is a f*****g disgrace to human potential that we raise people with this idea of empowerment through luck.Luck should not be the empowering factor.Ambition, effort, direction in life, and visualizing how your identity matches your destiny—that should be the guiding star. That should be the North Star. Not clinging to naked, naive hope where mathematics and probability theory prove you wrong time and time again.We should be past this as a species.But we’re not.And you see it in other areas as well. People, myself included, are very often deluded by wishful thinking, which is definitely reinforced by the act of buying a lottery ticket.Let’s say you are a citizen of a country—whether you chose that country or not. That country may end up going to war because of some wishful thinking: that the other side will give up, or that war will somehow rescue the economy, or protect resources, or solve some deep structural problem.If the leaders paint a beautiful enough narrative, they can induce a lot of wishful thinking in the population at large. And this transforms into public support for the powers that be and their narratives, even though those narratives are built on illusion.America will be great again. We will dominate this part of the hemisphere. We will secure our influence everywhere because we are the greatest country on earth.People are deluded by wishful thinking in this way, and they allow for what a bully normally does: puffing themselves up, trying to appear bigger, more powerful, more impactful, more interesting than they actually are.But sooner or later, it always backlashes.And it backlashes not just upon the leaders. The leaders usually know how to protect themselves. They often have the financial or political means to get away relatively unscathed.But the people are the ones who are burnt by these delusions.The Ruler and the RuledIndirectly, my mind then jumped to a higher truth in this setting regarding the ruler and the ruled—an idea stated in an old French philosophical text, which I believe may already have been published in the 1500s or 1600s, though I do not remember exactly. I think the title is The Voluntary Servitude.The author explores how, without the voluntary servitude of the people—without the people accepting the rule of those above them—the ruling would not exist.So implicit in that is the fact that unless the people, in aggregate, do something that forces the powers that be to adjust their agenda and alter the direction they are taking on behalf of everyone else, then they are accepting it.Because without enough acceptance in practice, the powers that be do not actually have the power.It is the same as the bully in the schoolyard. He is just one out of a hundred kids. But without the yes-men in the room, without everyone bowing to the bully, the bully is nothing.If the people serving under him were clear enough in their minds and bodies to say, “I do not serve this bully,” then the bully would not rule the playground.It really is that simple.So as long as the people, on aggregate, are not clear enough about the fact that they are not meant to be ruled by the powers that be, then the powers that be have more or less free rein until a certain point.But in most cases, that point is never breached.My Own Relationship to MoneyBut let’s get back to the issue of money and make this more personal.This is a touchy subject—your personal relationship to money.And I would love it if, now that I’m going to open up quite a bit, any of you reading or listening would also feel willing to open up about this topic of money. You do not need to disclose how much money you have in your bank account. That’s not what this is about.It is about your psychological anchoring to the concept of money or financial resources, and reflecting for your own sake on how that relationship came about from childhood onward, and how it has developed over time.If I go back to my own childhood, I would say money was not talked about.Money was not something openly discussed in the household. Rather the opposite. We did not talk much about money.And still, money was spent—as in all households, money is spent.But I think if you don’t talk about money and money is still being spent, there is already a discrepancy forming in the mind of a child. Because you don’t see the effort needed to earn all that money. You don’t see it accumulating over time. You just see a flow.Someone is working, perhaps earning money, and then spending money.And I can trace this to my own relationship to money. When I started earning money for myself, I was spending it quite quickly on whatever came my way.In my younger years, that meant expensive hobbies. Stupid hobbies, in some cases. Collecting hockey cards. Collecting pogs—those little things you flipped with your thumb. It was partly a game, but even more about collecting.And slightly less stupid, because they at least had some educational or creative element, I got into Warhammer and Warhammer 40K—miniature plastic and metal figures. That too was a very expensive hobby for a child of eleven or twelve. You bought expensive figures, then tiny expensive cans of paint and brushes, and then painted them and played with them. There was a storytelling and fantasy-building aspect to it, which of course is beautiful in its own way, but still: it was an expensive hobby for a child.Then I was buying quite a lot of CDs.And at the end of elementary school, I started collecting LPs. Of course, one could say that was a kind of necessary consumption in order to access music. And I did love music, and it has enriched my life ever since, so that is less of an issue.But then came my teenage years, when I really started to earn money myself.Before that, I had done things like delivering newspapers on weekends. That was my first job. I think I was twelve or thirteen. Probably twelve, because it was before we moved apartments.That money was spent on hobbies.Then in my early teenage years, from the end of elementary school and through most of high school, I was actually working quite a lot in the evenings and weekends after school.And these were shitty jobs.Telemarketing.Selling bad products, or products people could have acquired in other ways, directly over the phone. Newspaper subscriptions. Magazine subscriptions. Cartoon subscriptions. Phone subscriptions. Insurances.At one point, someone came to our school at a company fair and recruited students to work extra for what was presented as a charity fundraising organization. But it turned out to be a scam. We were calling people and thought we were helping them donate to charity, but the little compensation we were supposed to receive for each donation never seemed to end up in our pockets.And then the contract required you to stay with the company another month after seeing your first salary, and you only saw your salary after the second month of working or something like that.Obviously, people are vulnerable to financial scams. And if your relationship to money is bad to begin with, you are not as suspicious.So I was working mainly with telemarketing during high school, and the money I earned I spent during the weekends—more or less by going to expensive clubs and buying alcohol.So I partied away all of this money that I could have invested in my teenage years.But I didn’t, partly because of my relationship to money.Then I finished high school without having accumulated much, even though I had worked a lot.China, Student Life, and No SavingThen I went to China.China did not help me develop a healthier relationship to money, because everything was relatively cheap apart from housing. So financially I could live in a similar way as I had in Sweden. I could survive on a Swedish student loan without much trouble.During my second year in China, I did work for about half a year as a tour guide. I was getting money under the table, in a white envelope. So that money too was just there to be spent. My pocket money, more or less. I did save up a little bit, but not much.So saving had still not entered the picture, as you can hear.I was not thinking about saving.Then I came back from China and started studying engineering in Stockholm. As a student, you’re often still in a similar financial situation. I was working part-time during some of those study years, but my relationship to money did not fundamentally change.Then I had a few years where my finances were somewhat shaky. I had not fully completed my studies and was working in different research labs, sometimes with a bit of a salary, sometimes with none.Again: not much money, and spending most of it.Crypto, Conviction, and ComplacencyAround this time came my first exposure to cryptocurrency.Starting in high school and continuing into my early thirties, I was off and on quite actively engaged in political theory. And now I mean political-philosophical theory, not party politics or day-to-day policy, but more idealized questions of political structure.My main reasoning was that I wanted to promote individual freedom. If there were a political framework or ecosystem that could maximize individual freedom, my conviction was—and in part still is—that it would unleash disproportionately more creative force and more forces for improving human conditions and human collaboration.In other words, I believed, and partly still believe, that it can be worth sacrificing some safety in order to gain more freedom.Through those ideas I was exposed to the rising crypto sphere, with Bitcoin at the forefront.I don’t remember the exact year, but I attended one of the first crypto events in Stockholm. They already had a Swedish company there that was making Bitcoin ATMs and placing them around the world. That company also had a crypto exchange where you could swap fiat currency for crypto.At that event, I did buy a small sum of Bitcoin.And I think I used it up just a few months later. It was only a small amount. But in today’s terms that small amount would already have been worth quite a lot, because this was still very early.I remember discussing with a good friend whether I should simply put in a few thousand Swedish kronor—say 10,000 kronor.I did have access to that money, even though I had not saved much. And we were both philosophically convinced by the technology. We thought it was only a matter of time before it would become mainstream—or if not that, at least remain a store of value, because the technology capped supply in a way fiat currencies do not.Fiat currencies are almost always diluted over time. The question is only how fast, and that tends to depend on the competence of the rulers handling the money.And rulers are not enlightened creatures.Human beings cannot centrally plan problems past a certain scale. That is why spontaneous order matters.So I could quite plausibly have invested 10,000 kronor. I was very convinced about the technology.But I pushed the decision into the future because I had no experience with investing. I did not have a relationship to investing. I did not yet understand that investing is one way for a person to put faith into the future of humanity—or into some subset of humanity, if one wants to simplify it.There are of course many ways of investing. You can speculate short-term on trends. But long-term investment, in my head, is a conviction that something is heading in a certain direction over time, even if not in the short term.You can revise those long-term bets, of course. But they rest on a systemic conviction: that your understanding of the phenomenon suggests it will trend one way over the long run.But I had not learned to project myself into that role.And that, too, is interesting.Because if someone has a healthy relationship to investing in something, they will also probably have a more mature relationship to investing other things than money over time and waiting for accumulated benefits and synergies.If you are well-versed in investing money, you may also be well-versed in investing time. You may understand the value of putting time toward a creative goal, or a personal goal, or a future self.Of course, these things are not black and white. You can be excellent at investing time into creativity while being terrible at financial investing. Or the other way around: you can have a banker’s mindset toward finance but no understanding of how to invest time and effort into something that is self-realizing and meaningful.In my case, I didn’t put that money into Bitcoin, and I have not earned a lot from crypto because I kept pushing the decision into the future.Every year that passed, I kept thinking, maybe now is the time to invest. But I never did.And it was not out of fear of risk.It was out of complacency.It was not a lack of trust in the asset over the long term. It was a lack of trust in myself as an investor. I had no experience of those gains or of the benefits of being a long-term investor.And this trajectory is nowhere near unique.Many people never build a healthy relationship to money, or to storing value over time, or to building trust in something and letting that trust accumulate—whether that “something” is money, a financial asset, or time invested into a purpose.Yet, to my own credit, and to the credit of my surroundings, I think I have learned to invest time through curiosity.I have always invested time. Maybe not in the sense of diving into one area for many, many, many years with compounding focus, but rather by letting curiosity push me forward.That may also be driven more by short-term inspiration than by long-term compounding, so perhaps it is all interconnected.A Late MaturationI think I am at one end of the spectrum here, and many people unfortunately end up even further out on that same end, while others through various means manage to build a healthier relationship to money quite early in life.My relationship to money is maturing later in life, at the very stage when I’m actually earning much more of it and beginning to see real numbers accumulate in my bank account.And it is still a maturation process.I do some investing now, but it is mainly passive—through index funds.And I think that is the correct choice for me, because I do not care enough about following specific market conditions to actively rotate money between sectors or assets.So in general I think it is better for someone who does not care deeply about money to be a passive investor. Because if you do not care, you are not going to put in the work to understand. And if you do not put in the work to understand, then there are millions of people who have done more homework than you and you will end up on the losing side of evaluating assets over time.But cryptocurrency I did care about.So if I had had the psychological tools—if I had been differently conditioned—I think I could quite easily have made accumulated investments there over time much earlier rather than later.And even more fundamentally, if a large part of the population has a poor relationship to investing—whether financial investing or investing time into something that compounds—then that weakness can be exploited.A politician, a political party, the powers that be—they can frame reality in a way that is not true.“It is a good investment to invade another country,” for instance—which it never is.They do not always say such things directly. Often they imply them through action. But people still end up thinking: we need to invade, otherwise we are not secure, otherwise we cannot secure our borders or resources.But it is not a long-term strategy to go to war.Cooperation is always the better long-term strategy on the level of nations.Competition matters on a smaller level, because it fosters innovation and differentiation—whether one is painting, or building a company, or developing a technological product through research. You need alternatives differentiating themselves in a competitive market.But at the civilizational scale, cooperation wins over domination in the long term.Self-ExpressionismSo that is me laying out quite a lot of my background in terms of my relationship to money.Another interesting aspect, which I would love to discuss further with you in whatever forum you end up communicating with me through, is how the relationship to money differs between societies.You can look at one country at one point in history, then move centuries backward or forward. Or compare different regions and cultures geographically. What shaped their relationship to money? To investing? To putting in effort and seeing the fruits of one’s labor?That is a very interesting line of inquiry.Money rules the world, in a way. But money is also just digits. Money is fiat. It is crazy.I spoke earlier about crypto, and crypto too may be turning into another kind of fiat-adjacent asset indirectly, because the fluctuations of fiat currencies and the broader monetary environment are imbuing it with inflationary dynamics, booms, busts, and speculation. I have not studied that enough to speak with certainty. If someone is more expert, they may well have thoughts on whether Bitcoin still fundamentally makes sense as a long-term hedge, or whether it remains resilient despite the inflationary pressures of its surroundings.My instinct says yes.That is why I will stick with my investments.But I do not know what others think.And I would genuinely like to hear your own experiences with money—how your relationship to money, investment, labor, time, and value has formed.Because I am trying, more and more, to open up as much as possible.For some months now I have started calling myself a self-expressionist.That is a reference to the Expressionist art movement, but taken even deeper. Not merely expressionism in the sense of painting a landscape as you feel it while looking at it, but self-expressionism: I am watching myself as an observer, and in order for the observer to fully convey what I observe—which is myself—I try to express it as fully as possible.I try to be as transparent as possible, to a certain extent. I still need some integrity in this world.But I want to peel back the layers of this onion, this ogre, in service to myself, and also in service to the people reading or listening. Because I think this is a way forward for many of us: not to be so overly protective.Because if you are overly protective, you are also hiding things from yourself. You are not just hiding things from the rest of the world. Every day you wake up hiding something from yourself.And if you put a mask on your face, the mask can, over time, melt into your face. Then you no longer know the difference between the mask and the face.And I am working very hard to prevent that from happening.Because, as for most people, it has happened to me at various points in my life. And when I realized the mask was starting to melt over my face, I began carving at it. Chipping at it. Trying to regain the facial features that used to be there.And for me, that is definitely one of the most important life goals—if not the most important.To rediscover myself.To fulfill myself through finding myself.To find my truest, innermost instincts. My truest, innermost thoughts, feelings, and reflections. My innermost relationship to nature. My innermost relationship to other human beings. And to be able to wake up feeling like myself.So with that being said, I aim to wake up feeling more like myself after this second round of night sleep.And I hope you will do the same, the night after listening to this rant.Invest in yourself.Invest in what you believe in.For today, and for the future.Namaste, team.Protect your life force. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com