Consciousness beats lifestyle

As the year is about to end it is a great time for a personal reckoning. Obviously, you do not need to wait for the end of the year. You will be surprised to know I wrote this article back in June, and simply scheduled it for today. This time I selected a wide range of subjects to read about here, here, here, here, here, and here.

What was this year all about?

Each year we can ask: what was this year all about? It is easy to focus on the strongest experience or the latest experience. For a full year analysis, we do need a diary. I have a very simplistic diary, which is basically a Google spreadsheet where each month I write down my biggest projects. While it started as a spending list for financial planning and accountability, after a year I expanded it to include intangible goals column, like learning a new skill. It made sense since acquiring new experiences requires money and time. I also introduced an annual theme to include the subject that was in the focus of the year. I will talk more about the annual theme in one of the next posts. As a result, I have a monthly diary of my major spendings with columns for business goals, consumption, and intangibles.

Once I have a diary I can compare the claimed goal of the year with where my mind actually was. For example, this year I decided to focus on spending time with my kids. Unfortunately, I did not spend enough time with my kids, however, a large part of my financial spending was on my kids. My business goal was improving my content and marketing skills, and I spend a lot of my efforts on that. For the previous year, my goal was burnout prevention and learning new fun skills. I learned a bit photography and cooking, traveled more than before and did not have a burnout, even though I was quite close in August.

You are welcome to build your own diary, using monthly entries, and share your insight with other readers.

Was the money really spent on intangible?

It is very hard to say when we spend money on things vs intangibles. It is clear that courses count for expenses on learning. When we spend on cars, houses, and clothing we are buying things. What about photography equipment, professional cooking equipment, a GPU-equipped computer to run neural networks? I think these are still experience-related expenses. An iPad for kids to play with is a thing, but a Mac to program an iOS app is supporting an learning experience. The money we spend on traveling usually covers the cost of an experience, but does it count as a learning experience? What if we learned a new language for the travel?

In many situations, it is very difficult to decide honestly if the money we spend is spent on things or on intangibles. Fortunately, this is not a tax report, so we can check the intent of the purchase. You can add it to the diary, I still trust my memory for this purpose. If the money was spent to have a “shiny toy” it is one thing, if it was spent to learn something new it is another issue.

Spending on intangibles is growing

There are many reports on the internet that people spend less money on things and more on experiences. There are several VERY different reasons:

• Trend. Learning is extremely trendy right now. So is paying for experiences. There are many reasons: (1) it is now appropriate to think that things do not buy happiness but experiences do, (2) new lucrative jobs and companies require very high level of education, (3) the best new toys are very high-tech and technological acumen helps to play with them, (4) the toys get outdated very fast and it simply does not pay off to buy them. So the best and brightest pay for experiences and all the rest follow the trend.
• More educated people. The amount of highly educated people is rising, and highly educated people look for more sophisticated experiences. There is a positive feedback: more people look for education, get educated and look for the yet higher level of education. And once your friends are highly educated, you do not want to be left behind.
• The cost of experience. The experiences get more elaborate and expensive than ever before. The college education is ridiculously expensive. Equipment for hobbies combines the semi-professional level of quality and cost. We travel further and faster and spend more money not to miss anything out. It is more expensive to develop and sell better experiences. The rise of demand for experiences is not immediately met by supply, resulting in higher costs.
• Star quality. People want to pay extra for a star coach, professor or mentor. Great teachers are stars, and some stars get a sidejob teaching people or taking groups on tourist trips. Great chefs have cooking classes, world class photographers earn money teaching newbies.

Sports and mindfulness

As we spend more time with digital devices, our body aches for activity and our mind for relaxation. Sports and meditation offer just that. The effect of sports and meditation on happiness is higher and longer than the effect of consumption, they are healthy for us, and if we do no do them we feel guilty. It is not clear if sports and meditation are incredibly cheap or incredibly expensive: you can do them in your backyard for free or you can pay for premium coaching and tourism. I think a country club membership is a good compromise. Once we build the relevant habit, we do feel some strange need to spend money on it. I really do not yet understand the mechanism behind it: (1) we are manipulated by marketers, (2) good equipment, food, and clothing improve the experience and the measurable results, (3) we want to five ourselves a price for doing the right thing. Maybe all of the above. We do spend more on sports and mindfulness than a generation before, and we probably enjoy it more.

Less free time

We definitely have much less free time as the generation before us. This has several strange effects. We have significantly less sex that the previous generation. We hardly ever dance. We spend more time on a social network than with actual friends. There is much less gossip than before, we simply do not have time to discuss who bought what and why. The little free time we do have we want to dedicate to the most rewarding experiences, and there is a strong competition between several very rewarding and addicting ways of spending our time.

Jealousy is a strange thing. We prefer to have much less, as long as other people get less than we do. As people shift their spending from things to experiences, we envy those who are successful in this shift. A Ph.D. education or iron men completion are slowly becoming more coveted than a villa and a sports car. Since we do not have time, the ability to dedicate a huge chunk of time to high-quality experience is something we can envy. We try to copy the qualities and behavior of these highly successful role models, and this is a good thing.

Helping people

Asking for help is hard since we acknowledge someone is better than us. As people acquire new experiences, asking for help becomes a sign of proficiency in learning, rather than lack of knowledge. Moreover, we do not ask as many stupid questions as we used to: we have computers to answer these questions. Our questions become more sophisticated and more interesting to explore. Helping others we not only feel better and learn more but also gain access to people who can, in turn, teach us something else and very different. As a result, we enjoy asking for help and helping others more than the generation before us, which is a great thing.

Conciousness as a process

Consciousness is not a thing, but a process fo personal growth and registering new experiences. As we value the experiences above things, we get more conscious and more open to deeper and more complex experiences. We all know the immense progress in machine learning. What remains to be seen is the progress of human consciousness: how fast and deep it is, remains to be seen.