如何浪费时间和金钱

2010年7月

当我们在1998年出售我们的创业公司时，我突然得到了很多钱。所以我现在不得不思考一些我以前没有想过的事情：如何不失去它。我知道从富人到穷人是有可能的，就像从穷人到富人一样。虽然在过去的几年里，我花了很多时间研究从穷到富的路径，但我对从富到穷的路径几乎一无所知。现在，为了避开这些路径，我必须了解它们在哪。

所以我开始关注财富是如何失去的。如果你小时候问我富人是如何变得贫穷的，我会说花光了他们所有的钱。这就是它在书籍和电影中发生的方式，因为这是丰富多彩的方式。但事实上，大多数财富的损失方式不是通过过度支出，而是通过不良投资。

在不知不觉中花一大笔钱是很难的。一个有普通品味的人会发现很难在花超过几万美元后而不去想：“哇，我花了很多钱”。然而，如果你开始交易衍生品，你可以在眨眼之间损失一百万美元（你想要多少就有多少，真的）。

在大多数人的心目中，把钱花在奢侈品上会引起警觉，而投资却不会。奢侈品似乎是自我放纵的，除非你是通过继承它或中彩票来获得这笔钱的，你已经被彻底训练过了，知道自我放纵会导致麻烦。但投资绕过了这些警报，让你认为你没有花钱，你只是将其从一个资产移动到另一个资产。这就是为什么那些试图向你推销昂贵东西的人会说：“这是一种投资”。

解决方案是去开发新的警报。这可能是一项棘手的工作，因为防止你超支的警报是如此基本，甚至可能存在于我们的DNA中，但那些阻止你进行不良投资的警报必须被学习，而且它们有时候是相当违反直觉的。

几天前，我意识到了一件令人惊讶的事情：时间和金钱的情况是一样的。浪费时间最危险的方式不是找乐子，而是虚度光阴。当你花时间享受乐趣的时候，你知道你是在自我放纵。警报很快就会响起。如果有一天早上我醒来，坐在沙发上看一整天的电视，我会觉得有什么地方大错特错。光是想想就让我感皱眉。坐在沙发上看电视2个小时后，我就开始感到不舒服，更不用说一整天了。

然而，我确实有过这样的日子，我可能整天坐在电视机前看电视——几天过去了，如果我问自己那天我做了什么，答案会是：基本上，什么都没有。这些天过后，我也感觉很糟糕，但没有什么比我花了一整天在沙发上看电视时的感觉更糟糕的了。如果我花了一整天看电视，我会觉得自己正在陷入灭亡。但是，在我什么也没做的日子里，同样的警报不会响起，因为我正在做一些表面上看起来像是真实工作的事情。例如，处理电子邮件。你坐在办公桌前做这件事。这并不好玩，所以它一定是工作。

时间的流逝和金钱一样，避免享乐已经不足以保护你。它可能足以保护狩猎采集者，也许还有所有的前工业化社会。因此，自然和养育相结合，使我们避免自我放纵。但世界现在变得更加复杂：现在最危险的陷阱是新的行为，通过模仿更良性的类型来绕过我们对自我放纵的警报。最糟糕的是，它们甚至都不好玩。

HOW TO LOSE TIME AND MONEY

July 2010

When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn’t had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I’d spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.

So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you’d asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I’d have said by spending all their money. That’s how it happens in books and movies, because that’s the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.

It’s hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking “wow, I’m spending a lot of money.” Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.

In most people’s minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn’t. Luxuries seem self-indulgent. And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery, you’ve already been thoroughly trained that self-indulgence leads to trouble. Investing bypasses those alarms. You’re not spending the money; you’re just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say “it’s an investment.”

The solution is to develop new alarms. This can be a tricky business, because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive.

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I’d start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they’re not even fun.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

-Original Address: HOW TO LOSE TIME AND MONEY

如何浪费时间和金钱

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