Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash
I was talking to a close friend yesterday on a wide range of topics ranging from the debt market pain to Japanese design ethos. One of questions that popped out was how debt has led to turmoil on every scale.
“Debt” – the origins of the word dates back to 1300, the French word ‘dette’ and the Latin word ‘debitum’ meaning ‘thing owed’. Interestingly, Merriam-Webster offers Sin as one of the definitions for debt. The concept of debt is much older that its etymology. Merchants in Mesopotamia inscribed debts on clay tablets as early as 3500 BC. The owner of the debt would posses the tablet and the borrower would inscribe his seal on it. In the 18th Century BC, the code of Hammurabi in Babylon inscribed the first known laws about debt. Some of this debt even carried an interest component. You’d wonder – something as old as 5000 years must have imprinted itself on human genes.
More recently, economies of liberalisation and easy money led to reduction in interest rates. Combined with ill-advised advertising, people began to borrow well beyond their means. As a consequence borrowing sky-rocketed. These institutions are only doing what they’re built to do – to sell loans. Taking it or leaving it is your choice. The magnitude and multitude of problems that debt causes is amazing. The underlying catch to owning accumulated debt over a period of time is this – You are borrowing time from your future for your present. No one tells you this. A concept like debt is unique – it doesn’t appear anywhere in the universe where you forsake a little bit of the future to indulge in the present. Almost all physical, chemical and biological phenomena operate on the concept of moving to a system of stable entropy. Debt flows in the opposite direction but we don’t realise it immediately as small parts of time are eaten away. It is only in the end that we realise, then what?
You may have to own a debt for a buying home – as long as this is within the limits of your income this appears okay. But, many a time, debt is like small winnings at a casino/ lottery. After the initial high wears off you push the limits and take in some more, and soon you’ve accumulated a mountain of debt. You have borrowed money but you have lent your time to the owner of the debt. The borrowed money will have to be repaid with interest whether your income keeps coming in or not – but borrowed time, there’s no option there. This is another debilitating feature of debt – it appears at your doorstep every month unlike your income.
Alternatively, reducing your debt gives you unimaginable control over your most precious resource – Your Time. This is a wonderful way to use money – as a tool to build control over your time to do things you enjoy, to do the things that make you truly happy. Miles Davis, one of the most influential Jazz musicians, put it best – “Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.”
Here's some interesting stuff I came across this week:
The Moral Bucket List by David Brooks: "It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”
Strategy vs. Tactics: What’s The Difference and Why Does it Matter? by Farnam Street Blog - “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu... "It’s not about success in the moment, but success in the long term. It’s the difference between the end of WWI and WWII. World War I was about winning that war. World War II was about never fighting a war like that again. The strategies articulated and pursued by the Treaty of Versailles and the Marshall Plan were full of markedly different tactics." - Edward N Luttwark in The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire
All of the World’s Water in a Single Sphere: This visualisation impresses upon us the scarcity of a vital resource in a mind-shattering perspective.
Everything I Knew About Reading Was Wrong: "Interleaving in the context of learning is the practice of working on different types of problems at the same time. It allows the learner to see connections between different fields and thus deepen his overall learning. Knowledge is not a linear path where you go from A to B to C. Knowledge is an infinite network, and things are connected in ways that may not be obvious."
When Solving Problems, Thing About What You Could Do, Not What You Should Do: "On a Saturday night in Modena, a picturesque city in one of the most well-known culinary regions of Italy, a couple and their two young sons dined at the three-Michelin star restaurant Osteria Francescana. The father ordered for the family “Tradition in Evolution,” a tasting menu with 10 of the restaurant’s most popular dishes. One of them, “snails under the earth,” is served as a soup. Snails are covered by an “earth” of coffee, nuts, and black truffle, and “hidden” under a cream made with raw potato and a garlic foam. As maître d’ Giuseppe Palmieri took the order, he noticed a slightly desperate look on the boys’ faces. Palmieri turned to the younger boy and asked, “What would you like to have?” He answered: “Pizza!”...then this happened…”
Thought I’m ruminating on - “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” - Lao Tzu
Till next weekend,
-
Prashanth