Whole Life Wealth

The waves didn't look too bad as I led my girlfriend into the water for our first beach day on the Big Island, Hawaii. Maybe three feet at the peak, but crashing with force. Then I stepped into the water, and the rip current immediately tugged at my feet. The water receded fast, dragging the sand from under my toes. In a second, my heels lost their support and I was thrown off balance. And the instant I started to wobble, the waves doubled in size, and one hit me right at the worst moment.

Knocked me flat on my ass.

That part felt normal. Waves knock you down sometimes. But as I'm getting up, the next one comes bigger and faster than I expected. And then they just keep coming. I keep getting knocked down, sputtering, eyes barely open from the seawater, stumbling to my feet only to get slammed back down.

By the third I'm on my hands and knees. On the fourth, I'm on my back. I can't find my feet. And stuck in that spin cycle, it hits me: Holy shit. Where is Stella? Can she even swim?

When I finally come to my senses, the first thing I notice is that my feet can't find the bottom. The waves pulled me a hundred feet out into the open ocean. I get my bearings, barely, and the land is so far away. I start screaming her name. "Stella! Stella! Where are you?"

By now I haven't had a real breath in what feels like forever. Exhausted, barely able to breathe, treading water, screaming. Then I see her. And her face has the same panic as mine. That's the moment I know I've gotten someone killed.

Because I know that if I only had to save myself, I might make it. I'm a strong enough swimmer. But I brought her out here.

I swim over to her, watching her struggle, and I decide I'm going to push her up so she can breathe. I face her, put my arms underneath her armpits, shove her up toward the air, and she moves on instinct. Her arms clamp onto my shoulders and drive me down while I push her up. And just like that, with one split-second decision, I'm underwater. Now I'm definitely drowning. I'm not one of those people who float. Too dense. And down there, I know I don't have the energy left to save her and myself.

I'm not going to tell you yet exactly how we got out. But by the grace of strangers, we didn't die that day.

The Counterfeit Scoreboard

Here's what I figured out in that water. Money meant absolutely nothing out there. My job title meant nothing. The thing I'd been climbing for my whole life meant nothing, because it could be gone in a moment. All I owned out there were three things: a body that might be strong enough to get one of us out, a person I could die for, and maybe a couple more minutes on the clock. That was everything I had.

And when I got out of that water, finished the trip, and flew home to my desk job in San Francisco, nobody even knew. Not coworkers. Not my friends. No one knew I'd almost died. The closest I'd ever come to death in my whole life, and it didn't register anywhere.

Work wouldn't have paused for half a second without me. Because when I got back, it still wanted my 9 to 5. It still wanted me to chase the next promotion so I could buy more things. So I ignored the only things I'd learned were real, and I let the usual script run right over me. Nothing changed. I went back to the same schedule, running the same wrong math on a Wednesday, which I'd almost died over the previous Tuesday. Because that's what the system tells you to do. You work to live.

You can't see the fortune you already have, because something's parked right in front of it. It's a scoreboard of society's making. Your money. Your net worth. The title next to your name, the square footage of your house, the neighborhood you live in. Sold to you on every screen, every waking second, by people who are very good at their jobs.

And I know it's counterfeit, because I've spent over a decade building it. I've worked as a product manager at a range of startups in San Francisco, all focused on getting you to spend, spend, spend. I've designed video games that keep you coming back day after day. I've sold people thousand-dollar headphones that promise they'll change the way you hear your favorite song. I've built food and cannabis delivery operations that make it oh so easy to stay planted on your couch.

Built the exact systems that tell American society what you need and how you get it by just pressing "Pay Now."

So when I tell you this is all rigged, it's not from research on industry trends or interviews with industry insiders. It's because I lived inside the machine, pushing the buttons and pulling the levers that shape your everyday life.

And because I knew what the buttons and levers were, I didn't let them push me. While the system told everyone to spend, I saved. I bought freedom instead of stuff. That knowledge was the blessing; the saving was the choice—the same one that's yours, whatever you earn. Plenty of people earned what I did and have nothing to show for it, because they spent every dollar climbing that same scoreboard.

And here's the worst part. That counterfeit scoreboard always points at a number that can go up. A title that can go up. Square footage that can go up. A new toy you can show off. But the real fortune behind it disappears whether you spend it or not, because time runs in one direction. The body decays on a clock.

Every chance you don't take closes on its own schedule, no matter how badly you want it back. No refunds. The water taught me that too. It can all end in seconds, with zero negotiation.

The Real Equation

So what is this fortune I keep talking about? Here's the whole book in a single line.

Sit with that and notice something.

There's no money in it. Money doesn't even make the equation.

It's an input to one of the terms at best. The one ruler society hands you to measure your life isn't even on the page. Notice something else. It's multiplied, not added. Because a zero in any one category makes the whole thing zero.

All the money in the world but no healthy body to use it? You can't experience any of it. A healthy body but no freedom? You can't use it. Nobody who shows up for you? You might as well be a ghost. But zeros aren't the only way to lose. Even if you keep all three alive, you can still shortchange yourself by pouring everything into one.

Here's a mathematical way I think about it. You're looking to build a fenced-off rectangular garden, and you go to the hardware store to buy the fence. You have a limited budget, so you can only buy, let's say, 100 ft of it. What's the largest garden you can make?

It might be tempting to make it long and narrow. 49 ft long × 1 ft wide, that only gives you 49 sq ft. Alternatively, you make it a square, and you get 25 ft long × 25 ft wide, and that gives you 625 sq ft. Same amount of fence.

12 times bigger.

Done with math and back to the three components. Let me define them.

Each one enables the others. None of them can exist without the rest. And every one of them decays at a rate you can actually predict. Because they all decay, there's a right way to spend them. I almost drowned and walked straight back into a life built around the wrong scoreboard. This book is me finally writing down the right one.

I call it Whole Life Wealth, and I'll unpack it as we go. The method for maximizing this new scoreboard, I call Computational Hedonism™ (broad strokes in this book, deeper research for the curious at ComputationalHedonism.com). Here's what I'm really offering you: a different way to see your own wealth. The lie society tells you is that you start with nothing and have to work to earn something. I'm telling you the opposite.

You start out rich. You start with abundance.

And if you don't protect these three things, you'll end up poorer while staring at the wrong number the whole time. It also changes how you read everyone else. You can't understand a person's wealth, rich or poor, just by looking at their house or their bank account.

That uncertainty, that nuance, is the most useful thing I can give you. Because it means you've finally stopped looking at the wrong scoreboard. And it all starts with the one piece of the fortune you can never earn back, no matter how hard you try or how much you have.

Your time.

@zee.kwan @wholelifewealthbook computationalhedonism.com