This post started as a standard Apan-shamelessly-promote-work (#980184) but exploded into deeper investigation into why we write. It's an artform and a method of communication, it's education and a way to create shared meaning across peeps.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
-quote attributed to Samuel Johnson
Sometimes I write purely for money; there's zero enthusiasm, perhaps a mild interest in the topic but were I independently wealthy and wasn't doing anybody a favor etc I would never ever spend hours of my day reading a certain book or crafting a specific argument in text. I do this to pay my bills, I tell myself, wielding my creative powers and analytical lens like a prostitute does her hoo-ha...
We're all prostitutes at the end of the day.
...and then there are articles that are bliss to write. The ones that literally take my breath away, that transport me away from my physical place... It happens to, me dozens of times a year, that I plunge into some intellectual exercise and emerge with a finished draft for an article — with no accounting for the hours that passed in between, having no clue what transpired... not the weather, not whether someone called me, not noticing that I need a toilet break...
The piece that most comes to mind for me re: this, is a thing I wrote a few years ago for the Mises Institute: "Ten Years Ago, I Discovered the Mises Institute. These Are the Things I Wish I Had Done Differently."
I was trying to work through the rambling, incoherent answers I had given to a friend on a whim a drunken night a few weeks before. (He had asked something like "if you could go back 10 years, what would you do?" (The obvious answer is "borrow all the money I could from everyone and buy bitcoin," but that's a boring answer). The piece was as much a cleansing, joyful way to get something off my chest as it was trying to produce valuable content for an intellectual outlet.
Fortunately, there's no way for publications and outlets to tell the difference (I hope?!) so they pay me nonetheless! :)
Anyway, here's a piece that was PURE EFFING JOY to write (#980184). It came out of me, like Athena from Zeus if you so wish (this is ~BooksAndArticles after all...). It occurred to me, while looking at the financial returns to education, that much of the assessment hinges on financing ( #978652, #979485). So I graphed some numbers in my psychopathically well-kept excel sheets and realized that damn, my shorting of the currency for student debt purposes is UNBELIEVABLE.
Here's a sentence I'm very happy with:
If you look through the commentariat’s opinion on student debt, they fall somewhere between profligacy for worthless degrees and a necessary evil to get ahead in a credentially inflated modern economy.
...and here's my main point:
Borrowing becomes not primarily a means for making productive, entrepreneurial investments or smoothing out consumption across periods of volatile incomes — but to short the currency.
Maybe leveraging out 401(k)s aren't that bad of an idea... speculative attack; whoever gets more debt, wins. (#979485)
FINALLY:
THE most badass ending I've manufactured in recent weeks:
Fiat currency turns monetary civilization upside down. Happy borrowing.
Indeed, friends. Happy borrowing.
