Thread by @TaylorPearsonMe

1/ If you abstract out a level, money itself is just a "currency" which can be exchanged for other assets like time with your family, trips to the beach, or books.

2/ You can think of each of these things as being "tokenized" and assign to them a certain value.

3/ The value of these tokens would fluctuate just like financial assets in a market.

4/ If you hadn't slept in two days, the value of NapCoin would be very high. If you hadn't eaten in a week, the value of BuffetCoin would very high.

5/ There are arbitrages between these assets in an individual's life just like there are arbitrages in financial markets.

6/ For example, someone who wants to spend more time with their family could take a pay cut to be able to work from home so they could see their kids in the morning and when they got home from school.

7/ In a narrow sense, this would decrease their net worth, but in the broader sense I am talking about, it would increase it.

8/ The value of [increased time with kids] + [smaller salary] > [larger salary]. Wealth has been generated.

9/ When you make life plans or goals, you are trying to identify the highest value arbitrages and make those trades.

10/ E.g. I want to work a lot and make a lot of money right now so I can work less in five years and spend more time with my family.

11/ This goal is based on the thesis that you can spend your time now making money and trade that money in the future for more time with your family creating a greater surplus than if you did the reverse.

12/ The trouble is that these arbitrages are very hard to measure. We have a strong bias towards overbuying things we can measure (e.g. money) at the expense of things we can't measure (friendships, family)

13/ (Side bar: I think in this analogy, time is a sort-of stable coin whose values fluctuates based on the value of a basket of other goods like earning potential, kids, etc.)

14/ There is not a "right" answer of course because everyone's market has different prices.

15/ If you really like doing something which also happens to be very profitable then you don't have a tradeoff between making money and meaningful work whereas, for others, this tradeoff exists.

16/ I also find this analogy helpful because there is no universally right answer (e.g. global maxima)

17/ However, there is a locally right answer (i.e. local maxima): there is a best allocation between these different assets for you, right now.

18/ That will change over time (e.g. seasons of life) and you will have to trade based on those changes. You never reach a perfect allocation because markets never stop moving (i.e. life is a journey).

19/ Some bad stress in the is because people are bad at making these arbitrage trades and overvalue certain tokens.

20/ Some bad stress is because they feel like their local maxima is wrong or not good enough and should be more like [insert famous person]

21/ Good stress is when you've taken time to think and plan and you know the right trade to make and are going for it but you're not quite sure if you can pull it off.

22/ When you do end of the year planning, think about what your market looks like right now and what the secular trends are. What can you sell now that is overvalued and likely to decline to buy something undervalued that is likely to apprecciate?

23/ One example: Relationships are systematically undervalued b/c they are difficult to measure. You can gain exposure to relationships by hosting events which require you trade some money and some time.

24/ I don't think I'm very good at events so my exchange rate between my time/money and events isn't that great compared to other people I know, but they are so undervalued that I still buy more and more EventCoin every year.

25/ The End.

Ps. What are the best trades you made in 2017?

One more extension: you can also trade between markets.

I.e. you can give your time and money to some resource which can buy more wellbeing for someone else.

E.g. buying mosquito nets for regions with Malaria.