Are you making progress toward understanding yourself and your world?

Georg Simmel in 1914

Are you making progress toward understanding yourself and your world? Or are you trapped in a cycle of repetitive work and repetitive attempts to produce pleasure? Are you on a path to realize your intellectual potential? Or have you given up on your mind and settled into a stagnant cycle of mindless work and mindless pleasure? Whom do you allow to direct the day to day motions of your mind? Is it a teacher who genuinely cares for your mind and wants to nurture it? Or is it an entertainer who tries to make money from you by pandering to your weakness?

When we seek entertainment rather than intellectual challenge, we abandon what is highest in ourselves and try desperately to console ourselves by indulging the mindless senses. Then, to pay the bills for our futile attempts at sensory gratification, we report to work. There we face managers indifferent to our intellectual flourishing, intent only on their own profit.

You can break the mindless cycle at any moment. Stop the mindless consumption. Then you will accumulate some capital and soon be free to stop the mindless production. Then you can finally get off the treadmill and begin pursuing your own unique path to understanding yourself and your world.

All things in the sea, living and dead, have the same density. If their density were higher they would sink to the bottom. If it were lower they would float to the top. And so it is with commerce. Trade equalizes everything so it has the same density. Things that are worth more in the market expand in size. Things that are worth less contract. This is what Georg Simmel means when he says:

Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.

In order to experience the true qualitative difference between values—the superiority of flourishing to stagnation, of love to calculation, of piety to cynicism, of kindness to cunning—you must leave the world of commerce behind. Then you can finally experience the freedom of living in the open air, outside the suffocating stream of money.

A lifetime of honest, diligent, devoted work in the world of commerce leaves you with exactly the same type of success as swindlers, conmen, prodigal heirs and retired dictators who flee to New York with their money. As soon as you have accepted the premise that the dollar is the measure of value in your serious work, you have decided everything that was unique and exceptional about you will be reduced to a single dimension, measured in dollars. Even if you succeed, your life adds up in the end to no more than what others have at the beginning through no effort of their own.

A lifetime of honest, diligent, devoted work in the world of intellect, on the other hand, allows you to leave behind the unique contributions your mind and your mind alone can achieve. A mind like yours has never come into existence before and never will again. It deserves its chance to leave its irreplaceable mark on history.