Is it just me or is Nostrudel in a state of suboptimal performance lately? I usually have it as my go-to desktop experience but it seems a bit haphazard in terms of what I actually see lately.
That said, it did drive me to check out snort.social which I haven't looked at in almost a year, and it's definitely been improved. The recommended follows was particularly useful as there were people I somewhat assumed I already followed that I didn't.
Just another nice reminder perhaps that different clients do different things well and the idea that we have to pick just one is a bit silly. Perhaps you have the one you'd recommend to a noob to avoid overwhelming them at first, but not sampling from the buffet is just restricting yourself unnecessarily. Save the monogamy for your human partner :-).
GM.
Was chatting on discord and figured this was worth sharing here for whoever it may resonate with.
Money is to Time what Fat is to Energy. If you have none of it, more money will buy you things that will save you time -- either help, tools, or preventative measures. Likewise, if you have no fat, accumulating a bit more of it will increase your stamina. Something perhaps we in the modern world forget, but those in starvation conditions don't. It is, at the end of the day, stored fuel to burn for immediate energy.
However, the obsession with ever more money is not unlike the person who is never satiated. Rather than increasing their time, the pursuit of money consumes their time. Much like the accumulation of fat makes the over eater sluggish, rather than energized, and even moving themselves minimally takes more energy due to the extra load.
The person with "enough" fat and "enough" money, rather than too much, or too little, can thus be considered ideally optimized. We can all probably look at our expenses for the week and know whether we have enough money, more than enough, or not enough to cover (and thus, need to work more or source credit). What gets hard, however, is understanding our expenses in the future. Hard, but not THAT hard if we think of it in real terms, at least to get a ballpark figure. We'll need housing, medical care, food, clothing -- see Maslow's hierarchy -- for however many years we are planning for. And it usually makes sense here to give ourselves a bit of a buffer (because having a little bit of extra monetary "fat" when we die is a lot less painful than having a shortfall). The issue is, fiat steals from us the ability to calculate what it will take to buy these real things. It steals from us "enough." Even saying "well, I can just invest in the stock market to avoid losing value" isn't good enough, because you still don't really know that number you're going to need. Just ask someone who retired in 2019 thinking they had just enough, before 40% of the M1 in existence got printed.
To use a cliche, Bitcoin fixes this.
But if you want to realize how early you are, it's only now truly being made apparent that it does. Do you think in 2013 people were throwing a stack of sats (or let's be real, bitcoins) together KNOWING their future was secured? Or when MtGox fell? Or during the Blocksize Wars?
Each of these events built conviction, but that "sleep at night factor" has been hard won, as we've watched Bitcoin vanquish dragon after dragon.
Anyway, this is getting to be a bit of a ramble. I guess my point is, when you're stacking your sats, and thinking about the future, maybe stop and appreciate just how blessed you are to have reasonable confidence in the fact that your ability to cover your expenses is going to be there. And if you're getting neurotic about needing more money, maybe stop and consider whether the stress you're putting into it is actually justified, or just a holdover bad habit that was instilled by systematic theft of your purchasing power. When your boss offers you overtime and you're weighing whether you want to take it or spend time with your family, ask yourself, "do I need this extra slice of cake?"
It's an answer for everyone to decide based on their own situation, but I hope you can at least take the time to be thoughtful, and to reduce some of the anxiety and stress around it. Your blood pressure, among other things, will thank you.
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