2023: half-baked ideas + rent-free thoughts

I kept waiting to have more fully-baked thoughts on these topics, but I thought it would be interesting to document what I was thinking about, at 28. There is no so-what, only the ‘now’.

1. Everything we do in life is a means to cope with it – I read this somewhere, and while it seemed dark and trite on the surface, it grew on me. It’s not a value judgement on life, just a fact. Friends and family are a means to cope with life’s inherent loneliness, fitness is a means to cope with our ever aging bodies, work is a means to cope with a restless mind and highly-developed brain, travel is a means to cope with staleness. Every moment we fill is a moment of coping with the inevitability of being a moment closer to death.
2. The efficient frontier of life overall may not be the efficient frontier for any single aspect of life: for life, it may be a 9-5 job, working out 5x a week, seeing friends regularly, spending quality time with family, having time for hobbies, reading, being. For work, the efficient frontier may be working hard and long, at the cost of other aspects. Do you measure this as a stock or flow concept? Several successful people who talk about balance in their late 40s over-indexed on the efficient frontier for 1 or 2 aspects of life up to that point. I believe you can’t ‘pay back life debt’ later on – health and fitness debt, moments of fulfillment with loved ones, books that could have sparked questions and joy. I guess, the question is, when is the balance sheet tallied? Every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade? Based on the time period you pick, the efficient frontier of life may be removed from the individual frontiers by a little or a lot.
3. Why do people have kids? What is a good enough reason? If it were not the norm, would as many people still choose to have them? Is it a way to cope with loneliness? For the first time, it struck me that maybe kids are a way to find meaning and purpose in your 30s. After college, we try to figure out who we are, who we want to be, what kind of work energizes us, what kind of partner we want. Increasingly, I suspect that there may be a local maxima to the purpose *most* people can find in work, with hobbies, with their pets, partner, and friends. Maybe it is a combination of craving purpose/ meaning, and combating boredom/ loneliness – a way of thriving and coping at the same time.
4. Inter-generational mobility:
   • An interesting way to evaluate the impact of a very high-quality education could be as a multiplier effect on top of the inter-generational mobility you would have ‘anyway’ achieved (assuming there is a base level of inter-generational mobility where you live).
   • Separately, as we get to the top decile socio-economically (more socially and culturally than economically e.g. Ivy school education, finance job etc.), how do we quantify a component of ‘freedom’ to measuring inter-generational mobility? E.g. For a Harvard/ Stanford grad with $350-400K individual income in their mid-30s, how much does it matter that their kids can earn $1M ie achieve inter-generational mobility? Maybe their kids don’t feel the need/ pressure to take that finance job or work themselves to death, and are free to live the ‘efficient frontier of their overall life’ at any point. How do you quantify the impact of this freedom on inter-generational mobility?
5. Do not go gentle into that good night: I think about this a lot – does living at the ‘efficient frontier of life’ overall even in your 20s and 30s mean you *are* going gentle into that good night? What does raging against the dying of the light imply, and how does it change with age? Is there a cutoff of impact that qualifies as ‘raging against the dying of the light’? Or do personal everyday acts of ‘coping with life’ count?