Look for people whose lives you'd enjoy

I was reading this lovely interview about money and finance. Not really my area of interest, probably to my folly, but it happened to be with one of my favorite writers in existence. I'd read the phone book if Lionel Shriver was writing it.

It's very inspiring for me as a young writer to read such stories of older authors who took the crazy gamble that is a life in the name of art and still somehow made it. It is, as Shriver herself puts it, a tremendous gamble. It's a risky choice, but sometimes it can pay off.

Personally, I'd argue it's a good litmus test, too. Yes, choosing to pursue writing as a career is a big risk. But if you let that risk cow you and are too scared to do it, then maybe that life's not for you, anyway. It's a good way for people to get very frustrated. They'll spend a lifetime resentful that their literary ambitions never came true, yet the truth is sometimes they were never willing to take the plunge, either.

Why would the Universe take a chance on you, if you're not willing to take a chance, in the first place?

Anyway. This is only marginally about writing. More about the people you take advice from. I felt reassured reading Shriver's interview, then thought "sure, but that's not the sort of person most sane people would take financial advice from".

Those tend to be financial experts. People who are good at money. Making it, keeping it, investing it. Alternatively, when we find finance experts' advice too tricky to follow, we turn to people like Andrew Tate and try to copy what he does with his money on the basis that he has lots of it.

But wouldn't it be more logical to take advice from someone whose life you'd like to emulate? Like I don't know about Tate, but some of these finance whizz kids aren't really known for their lifestyle. They're good on investment and crypto maybe, but you don't know a whole lot about their life. And that's fine, that's not what they're selling. But then, why are you listening to them?

For me, it made perfect sense taking money inspiration from someone like Lionel Shriver because she's someone whose lifestyle fits my ideas of a good life. She's someone I've heard speak (or write, rather) about the joys of dancing alone in her dinghy New York apartment. She's someone who moved to Northern Ireland for a few years because she liked the feel of it. She's someone who now lives just outside Lisbon with her musician husband. All that while writing, both fiction and political and culture articles, and never backing down or compromising on her artistic integrity.

Sounds pretty good to me. I'd want that for myself.

I'm not sure I want the lives of the people YouTube pops up when I search "finance" or "investing". So why should I listen to them? Because they're experts in their field. Sure. At the same time, that's exactly it. While I'm sure their advice would come in handy to some select people who have the resources and time to properly go into this thing, it's unlikely it will help me personally. I've yet to see a video that says "how to sort of be smart about money when you're trying to make it as a writer and also like to travel the world".

From what I'm seeing the Internet is full of young dudes trying to emulate these Andrew Tate types in the hopes of getting crazy rich, without actually stopping to think what the life they really want looks like. Obviously, money tends to make most things easier, and we tend to shrug and say "fuck it, let me get the money first and I'll figure everything out later".

Except we don't. Most people lack the intellect and emotional intelligence to be able to identify on the fly what they need or what would mean a satisfactory life for them. Because they never invested in knowing themselves. So the premise of fuck it, I'll get rich then know what to do doesn't really fly for most people. They get some money but are still stuck in that copying mentality, so they end up blowing it on a car or pretty girls or Armani suits.

I just wonder if we wouldn't all be better served if we first sat down and figured out the sort of life we wanted for ourselves. Like what kind of money do I need to live happily? It differs, you'll be surprised to learn. And the better you know what you'd do with money, the more you understand how much money you'd need for a decent life. It allows you to also understand what risks you're willing to take in life, and to work out a general strategy for arriving at an existence that would make you happy, more or less.

It's weird, everyone seems to recognize the importance of educating yourself financially and treating it as top priority. It's a priority. Not the priority. Who decided you'd finished educating yourself and growing in all the other meaningful ways in your life, and could graduate to figuring out how to do money?