It really is very hard to care about money past the point it stops being a source of immediate anxiety. People capable of caring enough to solve for money past their personal anxiety point have a kind of superpower. It might even be the defining trait of entrepreneurs.

If you stop worrying at say 10k in the bank, but need 100k in non-personal funds to start a project, being able to care enough to go after it (as opposed to caring enough about the thing you intend to do with it) is a superpower. It’s not enough to want it as a means to an end.

Past trivial amounts, money is tricky enough to make that you have to care about it as an end in itself. The instrumental relationship to money breaks down at edges of paycheck band (~14-150k). Below, it looks like magic. Above, it gets gamified (stock comp starts to dominate).

I don’t think this is an accident. Paychecks = middle-class. The value of money evolves to get calibrated so that the instrumental band of complexity of making it coincides with average intelligence and lifestyle anxiety levels.

If the middle class is ever forced to to think non-instrumentally about money, which means being outside the game enough to see it and play it with a bit of meta cognitive mindfulness, but not so much outside that you stop caring entirely, it goes full Kanye.

For the really poor, below the poverty line, money is advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Getting any feels like divine beneficence. The attitude towards money is a dull, chronic anxiety punctuated by cash crises that are resolved via social means, not directly.

For the middle class, money is not distinguishable from the instrumental recipes they have learned to make it. You crank this handle 40 hours a week, paychecks come out the other end. It’s mostly financial apathy punctuated by the occasional acute anxiety attack.

These anxiety attacks are solved with some mix of formal institutional debt, one-off hacks, and the occasional windfall. Where the poor stay beholden you friends and family in webs they often hate, the middle class gets beholden to institutions via scripted, ceremonialized debt.

But for those able to transcend the instrumental view of money, it becomes possible to make way more than dictated by your anxiety levels. This means setting up money-spinning engines that break the effort-reward correlation characteristic of middle-class money-making recipes.

This is not “passive income” so much as “live money.”

I’m pretty bad at it. Most of my income is tied to effort-reward recipes. It’s not as deterministic as paychecks, but it’s still instrumental recipes not engines. Maybe 5% is from the engines at most.

New goal is to increase that 5% to maybe 15-20%. True leisure time is only created in correlation to live money. No matter how leveraged, effort correlated recipe money, dead money, can’t spin off true leisure.

Live money/dead money is basically like live player/dead player.

It’s only live money if you can buy you Monday morning leisure time. Dead money effort recipes can only buy you evening-and-weekend leisure time. Cognitively speaking, the dregs of attention.

And it’s only leisure activity if nothing critical or financially anxiety-provoking is riding on the outcome. If you make money off it, it’s true “free money” in psychological accounting. Free money is of course even better than live money. It’s more than live. It’s living free.

Live-and-free money is not earned with intention and instrumental effort (dead money) or collected as a rent (live but not free money). It’s the best money because it’s a genuine surplus from freely undertaken leisure behaviors. It’s the money you’ll feel happiest spending.