Bekit
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- Aug 13, 2018
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Ah, youth. Why is it so hard to appreciate time when you're young? Why is it so hard to appreciate time, period?They would have to hate their life and have a death wish. At 90, each year, your death probability is roughly 1 in 6. Roll a dice.
It shouldn't be appealing to anyone. At 90, his riches don't matter at all. He's one of the poorest people in the world in the most important asset there is: time.
Made me think of this:
Time is finite. Which is a fancy way of saying that you only have so much of it – then it will run out. When you are young, time seems to stretch into the distance for so far that surely it will always be on your side? When the young catch the old unawares, they may sometimes glimpse a look of naked envy, which is then instantly disguised.
And the old have reason to be envious. Truly, truly, they do.
Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back. The answer would be everything I own and everything I will ever own. In The Odyssey we read:
And Achilles replied, ‘Do not speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I would rather live on earth as a bondsman to the meanest peasant, than be king of all the shadows.’
Homer, as always, is right.
If you are young and reading this then I ask you to remember just this: you are richer than anyone older than you, and far richer than those who are much older. What you choose to do with the time that stretches out before you is entirely a matter for you. But do not say you started the journey poor. If you are young, you are infinitely richer than I can ever be again.
Money is never owned. It is only in your custody for a while. Time is always running on, and the young have more of it in their pocket than the richest man or woman alive. That is not sentimentality speaking. That is sober fact.
From Felix Dennis's How to Get Rich. Sadly, he died at 67, over two decades younger than Buffett is now.
I've had this quote on a sticky note on my laptop background for the last 3 years:
“The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!”
by Arnold Bennett (1910)
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