Profitable Lives

You only have one earthly life from which you can profit. Timism can help you leverage the most profit from your life. Essential to benefiting from timism is accepting that time is the only wealth that you have.

In seeking to profit the most from life, you are seeking to minimize the problems in your life which waste your time. Since profit means "forward existence or time"" (pro esse), when you reduce the time-wasting problems in your life, you are profiting you life. Since many problems are on-going (food, shelter and clothing) if you reduce the time required to fulfill these needs, then you are living a profitable lifestyle. (Pro esse is also the origin of pride/proud.)

Time, in and of itself, is not wealth, for we all have the same days of 24 hours. The wealth of life is synonymous with the number of hours that you enjoy living. The person who enjoys life each waking hour is richer than the person who enjoys life only for the first few beers after a day of hated work. If you are enslaved by self or others to a 24/7 life of stress, then you have no wealth even if you have the keys to Fort Knox. The wealth of life is tied to the hours that you are free of life's worries or problems. A person on welfare can have more carefree hours than a working person.

While the modes of self-enslavement and self-lies to the wants of life are treated within the brain bee for life lies,  the focus of this treatise is how to minimize the amount of time to fulfill basic needs of life. Needs are food, shelter, clothing, health and time.

The "grass is greener" and "keeping up with the Jones" forces many people to keep increasing the amount of time that they spend on basic needs. A bigger house. A second house. A bigger car. A second car. New garments when the old have not worn out. More expensive restaurants where the food is not better for your health. Overtime in order to pay the costs of a health club across town when the driving time and overtime spent walking would bring greater health and greater longevity. More expensive friends who pressure you into needing bigger homes, bigger cars and bigger clothes. Unnecessary work for the necessities of life is not a profitable life. Most must need houses become the modern home.

The following describes several guidelines by which to lead a more profitable life in fulfilling life's basic needs. The analysis is done in time. The following is extreme.

1. Food. Analyzed not how many dollars you spend on food but how much time you spend on food. Determine the dollars you spend on groceries and eating out. Add the time you spend driving to and from stores and restaurants. Set a goal of cutting your time costs in half. The author is very fond of pouring a 16 oz cup of water into a coffee pot to quickly cook a bowl of Ramon Noodles in a few minutes for twenty cents. While the water is percolating you can cut up a few vegetables. If you forget to remove the coffee grounds, diluted coffee offers an interesting twist. At the lifehour rate of $14, one can fulfill one's daily nutrition with only 30 minutes of time. The author avoids restaurants where entree costs are greater than the average lifehour earnings. Overpaying for food only increases the cost of one's living. It is not profitable to fund demand for goods and services that divert motivation and brains from one's basic needs. If you can't have a good time in decent mom and pop saloon, then you are living an unprofitable lifestyle harmful to self and others.

2. Clothing:  What percentage of your lifehours do you devote to clothing? Tally it up. Set a goal of cutting your costs to 10% so you can profit your life by a 90% gain. Except for inner garments, the second-hand thrift store is most profitable place to acquire the outer garments to protect your health and comfort. Fifteen years ago a smart-looking lined jacket was purchased for five dollars. The annual cost to stay warm and healthy has been sixty cents a year. At a lifehour value of $12 at the time, I worked only three lifeminutes a year to stay warm. (When I moved to Minneapolis I was relieved of the need to buy an Arctic coat by the gift of a deadman's coat.)
   Some people think they need new garments because their "friends" will not like the same clothes. Friends engender a profitable, freer life, not enslavement. Cheap, good clothes are a litmus test for attracting and keeping good friends. Friends judge you on the freedom you bring to their lives as so should you. The jacket is good for a good number of more years if I can keep from getting fatter. Clothes horses are dumb mules.

3. Housing:  Americans are unprofitable in their living quarters. They take false pride in size and location.  Sizewise, Americans keep wanting larger homes isolated from others. It's amazing how people talk about distance from work that they travel each day.  Is this false pride? Is this a profitable way to spend your life? Most houses are modern homes. Has one had a profitable year or life if one spend more time housing than was needed? (Pride and profit are semantic cousins derived from the same Latin origin, pro esse.)

4. Health: Walking is regarded as one of the best exercise for heart and health. Breathing toxins is bad for heart and health. One of the most ironic and unprofitable life behavior are the people who spend more time to paying for and transiting to exercise walkers at health clubs than is spent on the walker which involves polluting the atmosphere. Treadmills are the embodiment of the Myth of Sisyphus: Overall, by the time people get off the treadmill they have gone backwards rather than forward.

5. Time Management: A sense of time is needed to get the most out of one's day and life. Ironically, people want time-keepers that are a waste of time, e.g., Rolex. The author found the still-ticking Timex watches would last three years at a cost of fifty lifeminutes of income ($12/hour.) The watches did not stop working--they kept on ticking long after the author's high rate of perspiration had corroded the chrome plating. Sufficiently corroded, the watch back scratched and distracted the author. The author's time cost to keep time was only three seconds a day. In honor of these great time-keepers the author kept them on this dresser as a reminder to wisely mind one's time to profit from the only life one has. Timex: The best timepiece for peace of mind.

6. Living beyond your means: When told that it is unwise to live beyond one's means, it is understood as "to spend more money than one earns." If one restates this maxim in time, it is readily applicable to a wider range of human frailties: One should not commit to spending more time than one really has.

   • Emotions: One should not express love or friendship for another if one does not have or is willing to give the time to the beloved or befriended. Guys are notorious for using "love" like a check drawn on a millionaire's bank account to buy affection. Girls are notorious for continuing to accept checks that bounce from emotionally bankrupt no accounts. Both are living beyond their means. Both are living unprofitable lives. Sadly, unwanted children pay the cost of these profitless, profligates who waste not only their time but the time of a new being. (To end this waste, the Youth Wisdom Forum has Guys Lie.)
   • Intellect: Most people live beyond their intellectual means drawing upon the defense: "I know it my heart." or "It's a gut feeling." These codeciles of blissful ignorance are false profits that become evident when the ignored problems bankrupt one's life.
   • Employment: Taking a job or position that one cannot honestly handle. The dishonesty destroys one's humanity, making each moment on and the job less valuable--see "I hate my job, pay me more."

7. Means equals Ends: When one lives within one's means, one steps toward a most profitable life where the ends and the means are same. When the means and ends are one, one actions are instantly and on-going in instilling happiness. Pity the spiritually poor soul who justifies unbecoming actions with "the ends justifies the means." This is a statement of delayed happiness. Living elsetime. Politicians institutionalize these unprofitable lifestyles for the multitudes. If you measure your life in dollars then your means and ends are not the same. Pursuit of dollars is symbols sacrificing substance.

8. Transportation: Transportation cost people more time than the realizes. Consider how the government reimburses travel at over thirty cents a mile. If you are traveling 75 mph, that is an hourly charge of $22.50 ... almost twice the value of the American lifehour. If you throw in the actual driving time which could  be spent reading or conversing on public transportation, your transportation costs are three times the average hourly earnings. If you are involved in road rage (victim or victimizer) the stress you carry over to work and home extends the cost of your vehicle. If you throw in how the pump prices of a gallon of gas is only a downpayment with the balance coming due in higher living costs from weather and insurance changes, private transportation is one of least profitable life activities for individuals and societies. At the adolescent level, the absurdity of unprofitable transportation is the teenager who sleeps in class in because he has work to pay for a car. Why does he work? Well, needs a car to get to work. What a stupid little self-enslaver. On the adult level, consider the multi-billion dollar I-495 Wilson Bridge in Washington, D.C. Why do we need a bigger bridge? So, people can get to work. Why do they have to work so much? To pay for the Wilson Bridges of life.Of course, one must not forget parking costs, for there is no free parking in life especially if your company provides parking. The time as long past when cars saved time for the individual or humanity. To think that cars save time is analogous to thinking the greater weight of a penny makes it more valuable than a dollar bill. Focusing on the occasional time-savings ignores the greater and constant time-drain of private automobiles. The more and faster we drive, the less and slower our future time. As noted in oil droughts, the tragedy of the 20th Century will not be the inhumanity that lasted a few years--Holocaust, Gulags. or Killing Fields. The tragedy of the 20th Century that will last centuries is the destruction of the human habitat by the unprofitable lives of American lives obsessed with the automobile. Like the horrors of local warming are nothing compared to global warming so is it that the horrors of the local holocaust in Nazi Europe are nothing compared to the accelerating Global Holocaust.

9. Hobbies:  The Japanese have a saying that the most expensive things in life are free. There in no free parking--just expensive towing charges or company store regulations. There are no free lunches--just delayed payment with high credit card interest rates. There is free love--just 18 years of child support (about $80,000 in Y2K dollars). Likewise with hobbies, some of the most expensive hobbies are first free. A free puppy? No, thirty to sixty minutes of time commitment each day. A cheap pony for only $150? No, decades of monthly maintenance hours as well has as easily thirty lifehours in dollars to board the horse. Beware the hobby that is supposed to make you happy if that hobby gives you less free time. Garages, basements, attics and rented sheds are full of people's must have past hobbies. Old unused hobbies are examples of people living beyond their emotional means.The person who develops an interest in reading books has the most profitable hobby of life. Parents of course engender this profitable activity in their children by buying every thing in sight when the kid begins to cry.

10. Employment: I hate my job, pay me more: People have a less profitable life as they remain in jobs they hate. Not realizing that the symbols of time are a poor substitute for real time--lifehours, the job haters seek to dull their existential bankrupcy with demands for more money. As they lose their humanity on the job, they have less for themselves and others after the job. This is especially true of those who push themselves above their level competence, living and working beyond their means--burned out and burned up. The human decay changes the nature of why one works, from enjoyer to a needer to a controller--(Prostitution and work). Unaware of how they broadcast the emptiness of their lives, the penniless souls fail in the basic, simple courtesies of being a decent human being. Their reward is a life with fewer and fewer friends yielding tarnished rather than gleaming golden years.

11. The Glaring Red Personalities of the Self-Prostitutes:  The story of Faust is the man who sold his soul to the devil for an earthly pressure. The devil has won the battle for the human soul. One need not long long or far to find the person who unhappily works a job so as to buy the symbols of a happy person. Their conversations reveal the bloody red attitude of a self-prostitute who sells their souls and bodies for wants they need not. Despite the tarty attire, associates know how the well-dressed horse earns a living.

12. Friends:

    • While it true that one should be friendly with everyone, it is not the case that one should try to be a friend with everyone. It's like saying one is responsible for the problems in the world. No, you can only be responsible for the problems in your life, that is, you can only respond to some of the world's problems. Likewise with having friends. "Friends" comes from "free". As you cannot solve all the problems in the world, synonymously, you cannot solve the problems of everyone you meet. You cannot free them from their problems. The situation is akin to the person who tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one. To have one friend is better than to have a million acquaintances mislabeled friends.

    • A friend will not harm you to waste your time. A person who in word or deed exacts upon you pressure to live beyond your means is not a friend. If a person pressures you to spend more time on more food, clothing, housing or transportation, the person is not a friend of yours or of the earth. The person enslaves and pollutes your personality and environment with wasted time. People require you to have deeper pockets are at best shallow friends.

    • A friendship is one in which either of the friends when confronted with a problem can call up the other person and say, "I have a problem, and I need your help." Friends are not Sunday Superbowl Buddies but middle of the night risers who will come to you raid if you need help.

    • Friendship is like trust. It is a power which can be abused and wasted. A person who is always asking for help but has not time to help you is not a friend. More descriptive of this person is the term slave-master. Friends love each other fully and unconditionally with love being understood as the willingness to give and invest time in others.

    • In profiting the most from your life, you need friends for those moments when you have problems you cannot handle alone. Friends are like rainy day savings accounts to be tapped when you are washed out. Fair weather friends are not around on rainy days. Friends are the Fort Knox of wise people who have invested their profits (spare time) into helping and creating friends. First and foremost among one's friends should be one's spouse and children.

    • What is the reward for living a profitable life in which you minimize the time? Happiness.

    • A lifestyle with one keeper friend is a better life than one with a 1000 former friends.

13. Profit from mistakes: When people make mistakes, two negative actions can be chosen instead of profiting from one mistakes. Negatively, one can keep repeating the mistaking. Negatively, one can become depressed. Either way one compounds the original time-wasting problem by wasting more time. How does one profit from a mistake? A mistake is a problem from which one can learn to save time, to "dance better" on life's stage. The pro ballerina or dancer (pro blem/ballet)can teach others how to solve or prevent problems for better dancing. Profiting from one's mistakes belies how those who don't live with and suffer from the problems (habitual politicians) can't really come up with solutions to the problems of the hood. They don't really know what is the cause of the problem. So, when something goes wrong, don't go negative. Be the quintessential, existential nigger who upon finding horse manure instead of a horse wonders which farmer wants to pay for such fine fertilizer. Be one of God's best diamonds .
14. Creativity:  Literally, profit means "forward existence." By solving problems, one creates more time. Creativity is often used to describe new solutions to old problems. If one wants to be creative in this sense, then one needs to be as profitable in life as possible in the ways previously described. Creative thinking needs both quantity and quality of time. By reducing the time you must spend on life's needs, you not only give yourself more quantities of time but you give yourself the quality of a freethinker. A freethinker is a person who has a lifestyle that frees one from life's worries and needs. A freethinker has more time and better time to create solutions. (see Creativity).
15. Mind, Memory and Flags: Investing time into how the mind and memory works can be a very profitable way of using your time. The mind is like beads on a string. Some people can string three thoughts together while others can string more. Regardless of how many beads you can string, there are times when you don't want to drop your beads. These times are when you want to concentrate on solving a problem. If you forget part of a problem (lose a bead), you won't have a solution. Training yourself to focus (keep the relevant beads together) is a must if you want to enjoy playing a game of chess rather than merely enjoy knocking over the chess pieces. When something goes wrong, try to recall if there were any mental flags. Learning to recognize these flags in advance is a way to get in touch with one's emotions. Unrecognized emotions more often than not lead one down live's problem-filled paths. The silent flags are one's blood whispering the secrets of success and happiness. These quiet cues are not heard if you always immerse yourself in a sloshing fishbowl or in maddening crowd.
16. Proud/Pride: Since pride/proud semantic roots are the same as profit, it stands to reason that one cannot be proud or have pride unless one has complete a profitable task, that is, one has solved a problem and created time. To use proud or pride otherwise is make one a liar.

Historically, there are many precedences for the proposals of how to profit from life by living a simpler life so fewer minutes are spent on life's needs: Walden Pond. There is at least one nation that has retired from the global rat race which has a higher standard of living and level of satisfaction than the US: Japan.

Notes

When you try to be a friend to everyone, you end up being a friend to no one.
When you try to take advantage of every free offer, you end up with no freedom.

Afterthoughts:

1. 110306 In a day there are 24 hours. A certain number of those hours are necessary to acquire the necessities of life, that is, the living cost of humanity as opposed to the lying cost of humanity. The latter is the cost of our ever-chainging wants, that is, how we lie to ourselves. A profitable life seeks to reduce the lifehour cost of living while splitting the extra time between helping self and others. Our excess time beyond the lifehour cost of living is the basis of our individual richness. Some people say they will help others when they get rich ... as they are sitting in front of the 42-inch plasma TV watching some innane sports or game show. A person who does not give half of their spare, excess time in helping others is a person who will lose their freedom as the problems of others grow into invasive social, economic and political problems, e.g., crime and terrorism. We are all rich, but some are richer than others. Some think only of richness in the symbols rather than the substance of time. The latter are those who are spiritually rich.