[motohagiography]

Invest money, take the satisfaction of investing in others and seeing them grow it, and reward people who invest their time to produce the things that really do take time, but don't confuse the symbols and their artifacts with the real.

My hack around this was to recognize the only things that were valuable cost time. Fast way to do that was by recognizing the difference between the symbol or representation of something, and its real effect. As a symbol, money makes it it really easy to acquire other symbols, but that's all they are. Instead, get good at something, and even use some money to make opportunity (buy the time, your own or someone elses) to do it, but the more money you spend on them the less satisfying they are. An example is buying an expensive instrument to take beginner lessons, where learning on one can be so unsatisfying and humiliating relative to its symbolic value as to discourage you from pursuing it. The basic absurdity of culture is the belief that if you consume enough symbols of desire you eventually become one - and also perhaps that it is for the lack of those symbols that you are not normal or desirable. Symbols certainly help us negotiate the culture around us, but they are not the substrate or the real.

A quant once told me that the ideal portfolio lets you both eat well and sleep well, but they come at a cost to each other, so good luck with managing, i.e. extracting value from - money. It's not a problem I have, or one that I particularly envy because I mainly value time, and index on sleeping well over eating well.