This Moment is Your Life

How to not waste it

Hi friends, below is my annual birthday reflection post, and I think it’s one of my better essays in a while.

Before you dive in, a reminder that my book Crypto Confidential comes out on July 9th. Pre-ordering it is the best way to support my writing, since week-one sales (which pre-orders count towards) are extremely important to the book’s success.

Morgan Housel, author of “The Psychology of Money,” had this to say about the book:

“My only crypto take is that if you don't find some of it inspiring, you're not paying attention, and if you don't find a lot of it absurd, you're not paying attention. Nat Eliason brilliantly captures both ends in Crypto Confidential. Every investor should read this book.”

Go here to pre-order Crypto Confidential.

I appreciate your support, and I can’t wait to hear what you think about the book. Now, on to the post.

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This is the first year I’ve felt sad on my birthday.

In earlier birthday reflections, I often talked about what I accomplished during the year, or some lessons I learned along the way. Last year I came up with 40 to celebrate the new decade.

But those kinds of reflections didn’t feel appropriate this year. The only thing worth investigating was the question:

Why am I sad?

And I discovered that there’s a happy answer. Perhaps, even, a joyous one.

I

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible, and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.” - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A year and a half ago, I wrote one of my better pieces: When the Money’s Too Damn Good. It was a reflection on how severely the quick-wins of working in crypto had warped my relationship with money, time, and work, and for myself it was a commitment to not fall back into that pattern.

Since then I’ve been on a journey to unwire what I’ve taken to calling “Work Escapism.” It’s the mentality embodied by The 4-Hour Workweek, the FIRE community, and the WAGMI get-rich-quick crypto world:

1. The point of work is to accumulate resources so you can go live your life.

2. But that’s silly because then you’re wasting your whole life trying to earn the right to live your life.

3. Therefore you should find some way to break out of the equation, either by rapidly accumulating resources, doing the minimal amount of work possible, drastically cutting back your lifestyle, etc.

I have a complicated relationship with this mentality because, on the one hand, it afforded me the life I have now. One that I’m very grateful for. But on the other hand, it created an adversarial stance towards work. A stance that’s codified in the myth of “work life balance.”

As long as work was a means to an end, it could never be an end in itself. As long as it was on the other end of the scale from life, it was not life.

So I made a change: I would no longer chase short-term things to try to earn the right to do the thing I wanted to do. I would just do the thing, for me, writing, and assume that if I fully committed to it then it would work out eventually.

But as I went down this path and kept recommitting to it, I realized there was a deeper problem. Work Escapism was a symptom of my relationship with time, and they were feeding off of each other in an anxiety-inducing doom loop.

II

“The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” - Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Embedded in Work Escapism is a certain attitude towards time as a tool to be used for the future. A resource, like lumber or gold, that can be spent and saved and have a Highest And Best Use.

That mentality is standard in the Western world, but the get-rich-quick memescape pours gas on the fire by suggesting that with the proper tweaks to your usage of time, along with the right amount of opportunism, you can get a 10 or 20 or 100x use of your time compared to normies. And so we end up with a deluge of productivity books, videos, and influencers, promising to help you optimize your time-investing like temporal financial advisors.

It’s a new symptom of the Denial of Death. Our lack of control over our own mortality is terrifying, so we’ll scrape our fingernails along the ledge for anything we can grab onto to as a temporary refuge from facing the abyss. Sometimes it’s building pyramids, sometimes it’s penis botox. The manifestations of your terror may vary.

The Get-Rich-Quick mentality says that you only have a finite amount of time for Life, so you should find ways to minimize the amount of time you spend on Work so you can get back to Life.

The Productivity mentality says the same thing, suggesting that you can get more Work done in less Time so that you have more leftover for Life. Or, if we’re being honest, typically more work. A race where the prize is more racing.

This attitude towards time as a resource to be optimized is so embedded in our psyche that it’s almost hard to see it. It feels like a law, like gravity, when in reality it’s more like a custom we’ve adopted. And that attitude is what drives the trophy-case style of annual reviews where you show off everything you achieved in the past year, along with your plans for the next year, hint at the same anxiety.

We are deeply afraid that we have wasted some of our precious units of life, or that we might waste them in the future, so we construct myriad apparatuses to protect us from such failures. Or, at least, to convince ourselves that we have not failed. If you can look back on the year and point to the many things you Achieved or Did or Instagrammed then you can let out a deep sigh of relief that you did not waste it. The year is gone, but you get a gold star for how you spent it.

You didn’t waste it.

Right?

III

“The point of playing is that play has no point. How can there be play in a time where nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?“ - John Gray, Straw Dogs

As long as you see time as something to be Spent Well or Wasted, you are trapped in continual self-evaluations of your time. You are scoring your minutes and hours and days and levying judgements on them, with that quiet hum of assessment always running in the background.

You can sense a version of this when you hang out in certain professional groups. There’s a semitransparent glaze over everyone’s eyes because while they may be dedicating 70% of their RAM towards the conversation with you, another 30% is allocated towards assessing if they should be talking to someone else. Are you important enough? Is there someone more useful they should be talking to? When should they cut off the conversation so they can be sure to check off Meet 5 Investors on their tasks for the day?

We are all living with a similar glaze over our eyes. As long as time is a resource to be properly allocated, we must be assessing the success of the moment we’re in. And as long as we are doing that, it is impossible to enjoy the moment as much as possible. The only moments we end up fully enjoying are the ones which are so obviously Good that the evaluation hum shuts off. We get wrenched out of our assessment and forced into presence.

But there’s a lie hiding beneath this mentality. Despite our obsession with a utilitarian approach to time, time cannot be wasted the way a shipment of lumber can be wasted.

Time just is. It cannot be saved. It cannot be spent. It can only pass, whether you like it or not.

And the more time you spend with your eyes glazed over, worried about whether your time is being spent well or not, the more of your life you’re missing out on.

IV

“…most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.” - Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

The trophy-case annual reflection points to the fear of wasted time, but it also points to another way many of us live: waiting for the next Big Moment.

Our memory is fickle, and clearly evolved to only hold on to significant important details about our past. It didn’t need to remember another day where you played with your kids and danced with your neighbors. It needed to remember where the food was, where the enemies were, what happened during the last famine.

We’re stuck with an unfortunate paradox of life: A happy life is not necessarily a memorable one.

An eventful life is memorable, and the more memorable a period of our lives is, the longer it feels in retrospect. But the events that create the bookmarks of our life are not always the times we enjoy most, and often they’re out of our control. Some percentage of the appeal of travel is that it creates a signpost. It’s an easy way for us to extend our perception of time.

The more we focus on these bookmarks though, the more we are stuck living ad interim. We judge moments as either a significant bookmark in time, or a means to some future bookmark. Most of our time is judged as a period that must be passed through until we reach the bookmark, or a period that must be spent to earn the next bookmark. Waiting and working.

And so we waste most of our life treating the simple moments as insignificant, because they were means to an end or inconveniences on the way to the next trophy.

Your life isn’t wasted by missing out on trips to the beach. It’s wasted by not laughing in the DMV line.

V

“Our lives seem to live us, to possess their own bizarre momentum, to carry us away; in the end we feel we have no choice or control over them. Of course we feel bad about this sometimes, we have nightmares and wake up in a sweat, wondering: "What am I doing with my life?" But our fears only last until breakfast time; out comes the briefcase, and back we go to where we started.” - Soygal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

So why am I sad?

It’s because I don’t remember much of this year. It flew by in a way I’ve never experienced before, and I have some terror that future years will continue to fly by just as fast until they run out.

I can point to a medley of explanations: we barely traveled, I have a much more rigid routine, I was working on Crypto Confidential all year so I have no “work milestones” to point to.

And when I linger on those explanations, my instinct is to try to do better this year. To force in bookmarks. To break my routine. To travel. To do more so that next year’s trophy shelf is fuller and I can be proud of a year well spent.

At what cost, though?

It’s true that most of my days are forgettable. I go through a similar routine, at similar places, at similar times. I wake up, do some reading, get the girls up, have breakfast, write, eat lunch, work on other projects, go to preschool, cook dinner, watch something, read, sleep.

But I love it. I fucking love it. Sometimes I fight it, my mind wanders and I start imagining some other life. A bigger house, a nicer yard, more books. But the more I learn to stop judging the time spent and simply pay close attention to whatever I’m doing, the more I enjoy it.

If I interrupted that joy to create bookmarks out of some slavish obligation to my future self, I would be doing both of us a great disservice. I would be interrupting my enjoyment of these beautiful moments by chasing Bigger and Better ones. And I would be condemning my future self to continue the grind of bookmark chasing.

Life isn’t in the memories of past bookmarks, nor is it in the future ones you hope to come. It’s entirely in this very moment. And it’s only possible to fully enjoy the moment if you are not judging it.

So therein lies the joy in my sadness. I’m part of the way there. I love my life, and I’m getting better at not chasing bookmarks, but I still feel some fear of wasted time. Some guilt from prioritizing joy over trophies.

I know that the only way out though is through. To try to laugh at the DMV instead of booking a flight.

Each moment is your life, and the only way to waste it is by wondering if you’re wasting it.

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Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, you will love hearing the insane, manic, financial thriller backstory that eventually led me to this frame of mind in Crypto Confidential. I also have more info on the book here.