Justin M 🌎

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The boomers shouldn't spend it all before they go -Refuting Bill Perkins' (@bp22) 'Die With Zero'- Bill Perkins is charming and upbeat. After a lucrative career in energy trading, he devised a system for ensuring that his wealth is entirely spent within his lifetime, which he turned into a bestselling book, ‘Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life’. His philosophy is simple: many wealthy people work far longer than they need to and never get a chance to fully spend their money, and this irrationality should be corrected. By expanding spending earlier in life, these affluent individuals could have more joyous experiences while they are young and healthy, resulting in happy memories that will stay with them as they age. The number and intensity of these happy memories can, of course, be maximized by ensuring no money is wasted. "If you spend hours and hours of your life acquiring money and then die without spending all of that money, then you’ve needlessly wasted too many precious hours of your life. There is just no way to get those hours back. If you die with $1 million left, that’s $1 million of experiences you didn’t have. And if you die with $50,000 left, well, that’s $50,000 of experiences you didn’t have. No way is that optimal." — Bill Perkins, Die With Zero He asks his readers to assign a point score to various experiences that they would like to have, and by comparing the costs of these experiences and pursuing them at the correct stage in life, he hopes to help his readers achieve an optimum point of happiness. He even has an app which helps readers get as close to that theoretical optimum as possible. "Let me say that again: We are solving for your total life enjoyment. That is, the premise of this book is that you should be focusing on maximizing your life enjoyment rather than on maximizing your wealth… So always keep this end goal in mind. Make “maximize total life enjoyment” your mantra, using it to guide every decision…" — Bill Perkins, Die With Zero I have chosen to focus on this book because it’s a useful codification of an impulse I wish to attack. This ‘spend it all’ philosophy, as exemplified by celebrities like Marie Osmond and Sting, is a growing stereotype of the successful baby boomer. "I just think all an inheritance does is breed laziness and entitlement. I worked hard and I'm gonna spend it all and have fun with my husband." — Marie Osmond @marieosmond "There won't be much money left because we are spending it! We have a lot of commitments. What comes in we spend, and there isn't much left…" — Sting @OfficialSting On the one hand, I’m sure my attack on Perkins’ book will seem to him very unfair - it is, after all, exactly as advertised: an instructional book for wealthy individuals who wish to be given the courage to spend as much of their wealth as possible before they die, and to enjoy their lives more as a result. On the other hand, this work, which I believe was earnestly undertaken by a good-natured man, is deeply naive of the nihilism of the philosophical project which is necessary to support it. This is a book entirely without a concept of the higher things - and this is all the more dangerous because its target audience is the rich and powerful. If we truly follow his path, our civilization collapses. I. HEDONISM & NIHILISM "…your whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on the experiences that make your life what it is…" — Bill Perkins, Die With Zero Perkins’ formula for a successful life might be summarized as follows: work leads to money leads to experiences leads to memories. Readers are called to progress through this formula as quickly as possible, in order to maximize the quality and quantity of the memories which serve as the end goal. Work can be abandoned once it gets in the way of the efficient conversion of accumulated money into experiences. Perkins mentions that we might want to spend some time researching new pleasures that we were previously unaware of, to expand our palette. But is this formula philosophically defensible? In 1974, philosopher Robert Nozick introduced a thought experiment called ‘The Experience Machine’, which he intended to be an attack on the legitimacy of the philosophy of hedonism (the ethical theory that pleasure - in the sense of the satisfaction of desires - is the highest good and proper aim of human life). "Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel “from the inside.” You can program your experiences for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside.” Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life?" — Robert Nozick, The Examined Life Thus, wonderful experiences and memories are truly maximized. And yet - is this a way to spend a life? My answer to Nozick’s provocation, which I hope my readers would share, is ‘no’. The question, then, is why? I suggest two categories of explanation as to why we should reject the pleasure-centric path: 1) The disincentive to do sacrificial but ultimately virtuous deeds; 2) The resulting inability to be a righteous man. What is the place of higher purpose in such a system? Of duty, of glory, of legacy? It is realistic to assume that many - if not most - of our opportunities to pursue these higher values may be unpleasant. The memories could be painful: men return from just wars with psychological trauma. The hedonist ethic is a prescriptive framework in which the psychopath and the narcissist can participate as fully as the virtuous man; the agent of destruction and squander as fully as the agent of creation. It is a self-centered philosophy, with the primary objective of generating memories: artifacts which can be uniquely accessed by the possessor and die with them. It is a narrowing of one’s historical view down to a brilliantly illuminated and closely scrutinized history and future of the self. It is thus deeply relevant to Nozick’s central question: “What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” "You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss." — Cipher in ‘The Matrix’, before betraying his crewmen Perkins might retort that he never precludes us from pursuing higher things if we choose to; that I’m taking his recommendations too seriously; that I’m attacking his formula as if it were intended as a fully established moral framework rather than a simple guide to help people spend their money and time more intentionally; that he himself provides for his children and for charity. The problem with these retorts would be that his book is highly influential and widely consumed, targeted at the wealthiest and most influential individuals within our civilization, and has direct and inescapable moral implications (even if unintended). Perkins, who has a nine-figure net worth, describes in his book the peak experience that his philosophy led him to engineer: a week-long party at a luxury hotel in St. Barts, the Caribbean island, in which he covered all expenses for his guests and flew in musical talent for private performances. Other experiences he praises include buying the ideal holiday house (despite its intimidating cost), and his friend who took time off work to tour Europe, where he discovered himself and ‘had sex on a beach’. He recommends that we must make best use of our body when we are young, not because our youthful bodies can be of use to any particular purpose, but because our ligaments might degrade before we are able to try wakeboarding. One can quickly see that the moral poverty of this framework promotes facile aspirations. Within this system, one might say, ‘Well of course I should do my duty and help others... if I feel like it. If I think the experience would be pleasant.’ And yet, this is the framework through which Perkins asks us to meticulously plan our entire lives. At the most fundamental level, the ‘I’ is not questioned. Who am I? What is my purpose? What is my rightful destiny, fate, and burden? All are skipped, and the reader is directed straight to buying experiences that they want, or, as is often necessary amongst the newly initiated to great spending, to learn what they should want to spend money on for maximum enjoyment. To the extent that the reader is encouraged to consider who they are, it is purely through the frame of better understanding themselves as a consumer of experiences. Nozick highlights the shortcomings of this conception of the self: "…we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has been long in the tank. Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It's not merely that it's difficult to tell; there's no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But should it be surprising that what we are is important to us? Why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?" — Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia Does Nozick’s critique not apply to the retired who spend their wealth on cruises and slot machines over their duty to the next generation? The lack of fundamental moral examination within Perkins’ thought produces contradictory effects: conceiving of life as a maximization problem with a local optimum is ironically a philosophy born of work and engineering; an absurd byproduct of spiritual death and material mono-vision. Perkins might contend that my objections fail because he has demonstrated that within his system, he has chosen to provide amply for his children, and therefore he has allowed room for virtue. He has a chapter on recommendations for the issues of children and charity (which comprises less than ten percent of the book). Unfortunately this chapter feels - and Perkins concedes this - like an afterthought tacked on to defend against obvious criticisms of his system. I think Perkins is pretty clearly a decent man in many respects, but this is despite, not because, of the system he naively advertises. II. FAMILY & LEGACY Perkins recommends giving money (in the form of trust funds) to your children while they are young, so they can get on the hedonic treadmill as early as possible. By spending larger amounts when they are young, they buy more experiences, and the resulting memories will give them pleasure throughout their lives (which he frames as ‘compound interest’). "In short, by giving the money to my kids and other people at a time when it can have the greatest impact on their lives, I’m making it their money, not mine. That’s a clear distinction, and I find it liberating: It frees me to spend to the hilt on myself. If I want to spend like mad, I can do it without worrying about the effect on my kids. They have their money to spend as they wish, and I have mine." — Bill Perkins, Die With Zero (Let’s put aside the question of whether, if you were taking this system seriously, you would even have children in the first place. Children are not always a ‘pleasure’ - consider sleepless nights, reduction in freedom, countless arguments. The satisfaction that children provide comes from something deeper: creating new souls to worship God, to perpetuate our culture, to nurture beings who will have beautiful experiences we will never be able to share. It comes from love, which is something deeper than an experience, and love is not always pleasurable; at least, in this life). Isn’t there something vaguely revolting about Perkins’ framing above? Of course, we should provide for our children, but the mechanism and motivation here is wrong. His recommendation is to initiate our young into the same ‘atomic experience consumer’ mode of being that he thinks his readers should adopt, so that parents and children can be atomic experience consumers together. Again, I have slightly higher aspirations for the lives of my children and the meaning that they find, and I hope my readers would too. On a practical point, for reasons I will discuss in a future chapter, the attempt to maximize your kids’ pleasure by passing them liquid cash at an optimal time in their lives for converting liquid cash to pleasure (while they’re young) is a recipe for disaster in forming virtuous people, but to this we will return later. Perkins also never quite solves the riddle of ‘why should I give anything to my children if other purchases would give me greater pleasure?’. This is, of course, an important riddle to solve: without a good answer, our society collapses. "…the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer." — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France By reducing parent and child to independent consumers of experiences who both seek to escape work to better pursue pleasure, Perkins erodes a sense of the grander continuity of the endeavor of man, who toils, generation after generation, to build a better future. Work is something only to be escaped when one is not working towards a noble goal. What of the shade of trees not yet grown? Would Aragorn ‘die with zero’? Would he ‘liquidate his assets’ and spend it all? Are not the fruits of our righteous labour as precious as memories? Family businesses, dynasties, and homes? "One can feel a connection with the products of a relative’s labor. A chair made by a grandfather, for example, that still supports the weight of his aged grandson, long after the maker is gone, is a sort of continued presence of the maker… He expended his life into the product; it is his personality embodied. He is recognized in it and remains with the family through it… The item is raised into a set of social affections that transcend use-value and appetite satisfaction and connects it with the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be born. It is not something merely to be used (as a mere means), but to be cherished in use (as a means and end). When our world takes on this phenomenological adornment, we see our world as a gift from others and a potential gift to our children. It is not there merely to be used, consumed, and discarded. This higher realm adorns reality with the recognizable ‘face’ of its past cultivators, compelling the living to live with respect to ancestors and to become worthy ancestors themselves…" — Stephen Wolfe @PerfInjust, Edmund Burke’s Eternal Society: A Philosophical Reflection Bill Perkins’ system - well-intentioned though he may be - is not a noble project. It is an entropic philosophy. Without a societal vision, without a concept of history, it breaks things apart. It permits no concept of kingship, stewardship, and the elevation of a people. "In heaven there are no tears; but if the blessed could weep, this would be a cause for lamentation, that they had lost any time during this life in which they might have acquired greater glory – for such time they now can never have." — St. Alphonsus Ligouri, Preparation for Death Die with a legacy. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider liking, reposting, and following. - Johann

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In calendar year 2023, NYPD cops made over 13,600 arrests in the subway system. Of these 13,600 arrests, 124 people were arrested 5 or more times in the subway system in 2023 alone. When looking further, these 124 people combined, have been arrested over 7,500 times in their lifetimes. So, in case you’re curious what your cops are doing … well … they’ve arrested these people over 7,500 times!  The better questions are … where is the accountability & consequences for these repeat offenders? How is this happening? Look no further than the other stakeholders in the justice system … prosecutors, judges, and city & state lawmakers … whose decisions, in large part, determine the outcomes and consequences for every arrest we make and whose decisions have such far reaching impact on the safety of our subway system. With that said, make no mistake about it, your @NYPDnews cops remain focused and steadfast in their commitment to advancing public safety.

German and Austrian traffic law requires drivers to form a Rettungsgasse (emergency vehicle lane) whenever traffic comes to a halt on the autobahn due to some emergency allowing ambulances, fire trucks, police, or any other emergency response