Your Time Isn't Worth Shit

In recent years, my personal investing has brought me in contact with a number of tech managers, especially in the venture space. One thing I’ve noticed is these people are obsessed with calendar apps, as if their schedules are jammed back-to-back — or they want to give that impression, anyway. If this is supposed to impress me, it really doesn’t, since I don’t believe that working more necessarily means working better or more efficiently.

My own schedule is usually filled with big gaps. In fact, on the days I work from home, my wife often accuses me of loafing. She will give me credit when she sees me reading a spreadsheet, but not when I’m sitting on the couch staring into space. “If I have my phone in my hand, I’m working,” I tell her, at which point she may peek over my shoulder and find Wordle on my screen. I’ll say that I’m waiting for a document, because that’s easier than explaining that farting around is a part of my process.

Valuing Your Time

The #1 enemy of the relaxed style is Naval Ravikant, an entrepreneur whose tweets and writings are widely followed. Ravikant advises everyone to set an “aspirational rate” for the value of their time and outsource whatever doesn’t meet it. Having set his own rate at a ego-healthy $5,000/hour, he refuses to personally do any task deemed to be worth less, including shopping, cooking, or 90% of the other myriad activities that comprise a “normal” life.

If Ravikant’s view was directed at working parents, outsourcing to free up time with their children, I’d agree. But he’s just about making money. “You can penny-pinch your way to basic sustenance,” he has said. “But … if you’re going to create wealth, it has to be your number one, overwhelming priority.” I would edit Ravikant’s philosophy to say that if you want to create wealth as fast as possible, it may have to be your top priority. I know plenty of people who were in no hurry and got rich over time, while remaining well-rounded all the way.

Actually, I don’t even agree that a single-minded focus on work is the best way to build wealth, whether fastly or slowly. Great inventions have emerged from time “wasted” on leisure, a hobby, or just dreaming. We’ve all had insights stepping in and out of the shower, in the liminal space between sleeping and waking. Google famously allows employees 20% of work time for personal ideas and innovations, copying a 3M initiative that led to invention of Post Its. Gmail, Google News, and AdSense were all thought up during Google’s 20% time.

These Substacks I write almost every week have nothing to do with my job as a fund manager, but also they kind of do.

Learning From the World

For a fund manager, personal interactions in the realm of the everyday are critical to developing a complete mental model of the economy and of companies. I don’t need to shop for clothes off of Instagram, but doing so showed me the uncanny accuracy of their algorithm and got me to buy Meta stock. When an item doesn’t fit, I could ask my assistant to take care of the return for me, but then I wouldn’t know what customer service is like at FedEx and UPS. You might think it’s not worth my time to even bother returning something I bought for like $50, but then you don’t know me.

On the way home I might pass a Starbucks and see it’s empty, a McDonalds that’s full, and a lot of young people listening to AirPod Max headphones. An informative walk! (By the way, if New York is a crime-ridden hellhole, why do they wear $599 accessories that can be grabbed right off their heads?)

Ravikant probably can’t wait for agentic AI, which supposedly will handle everything for us, dealing with AI on the other side of the transaction (maybe calling us “stupid meatbags” behind our backs). To the extent AGI shields us even more from the world, it will further reduce our humanity. As noted in a Substack post by Everyday Epicurean, the Romans had a concept of otium, “A sophisticated art of living, a deliberate space of contemplation that is neither work nor mindless recreation, but something far more nuanced.” To deny time for contemplative leisure and demand constant productivity is to relegate oneself to narka, a robotic state of disconnection.

Finally, at least for an investor like me with a medium-to-long term horizon, a felt need to be always active can become a negative. It can lead to overtrading when the right strategy is to take a breath, think awhile, then do nothing. In the middle of the 2003-2007 emerging markets bull run, I presented to a high-net worth investment group called The Greenwich Roundtable and said that at that point I thought my job was to go to the office, sit at my desk, and not sell until it was time to go home. (They didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.)

Defeating AI with Philosophy

Ironically, since I’m sure Ravikant loves AI, his position seems to be undermined by it. Let’s say you’ve followed his advice, chasing a business goal to the exclusion of all else, and AI has suddenly made it obsolete: now you have neither a fulfilling personal life nor a career. Given the impossibility of predicting the future of jobs, it may be that the safest course is to develop the most uniquely human, least programmable skills.

College graduates with degrees in philosophy and creative writing may soon be more employable than computer science majors. Flexible minds that can analyze novel and complex situations, clearly communicate their views, and deploy emotional intelligence to reach mutual understanding should be well suited to the AI-dominated workplace.

This means that the more varied interests we pursue, and the more interactions we experience while pursuing them, the more irreplaceable by computers we become. To quote Kurt Vonnegut from his great essay about the joys of going out to buy an envelope, “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”