Szia! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special 'Back on Track' edition, because I am finally getting settled in NYC and feeling very excited to get back to my 'real life' in all of the ways (e.g., eating, sleeping, exercising, working, socializing, writing this digest, painting underground graffiti murals, etc.).
Source: Giphy
This week's topics include finding a NYC apartment, the origins of materialism, strengthening relationships, the emotional benefits of religion, the opportunity cost of personal investing, how exercise improves our lives, and creating principles to live our lives well. Enjoy!
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"You can get what you want out of life if you can open-mindedly reflect, with the help of others, on what is standing in your way and then deal with it." ~ Ray Dalio
TOPIC OF INTEREST - NYC APARTMENT SEARCH
TL;DR: Well that was way harder than I thought... but it's finally over. I have a (tiiiiiny) physical location within which I will build a home soon! Exciting times. As I went through this ridiculous process over the past few weeks, I had a few random thoughts that seemed worth sharing.
Random thoughts:
Reliance on proxy variables to find 'quality' roommates: I was originally looking for a roommate situation (i.e., they have an apartment, I'd be a new roommate). Three times I had a tentative 'Yes', but they ended up delaying a few days and finding someone within their network (e.g., friend of friend, current roommate's old roommate), etc. This is totally understandable (albeit frustrating) - I was a complete stranger, and they were optimizing for trust / not getting a lemon. That said, in none of these cases did they even attempt to do diligence on 'trust' for me, e.g., ask for prior roommate references. They always used the proxy variable of 'we have a mutual connection' to select a new roommate, rather than actually researching the more difficult question (will this person be a great roommate?). For what seems like a large decision, this felt intellectually lazy.
Holy $@$@ are there principal-agent problems galore: The apartment I ended up signing up for was through a broker, leasing on behalf of a management company, who manages the apartment on behalf of an LLC owned by four individuals. There are so many layers of incentives here, I don't know where to begin. Key in this complex arrangement was that working through seemingly minor issues created tremendous transaction costs and loss of communicative clarity (Note to anyone running a hierarchy). One other highlights on this subject, and a massive shout-out to my friend Sarah, who shared a hack for exploiting the principal-agent problem: Tell the broker you won't negotiate their fee down, in exchange for a reduction in rent. Broker wins, you win, owner loses.
Engendering trust... isn't necessary?!: The broker bait and switch - around a dozen times I reached out directly to a broker about an apartment, only to learn that apartment had just been rented, but a more expensive one in a different neighborhood was available. Talk about engendering trust at the beginning of a relationship! They must do it because it works, I just can't believe it works.
Remember to empathize with their priorities: My home and where I live matters a tremendous amount to me. For a residential real estate broker, renting a studio / 1BR is low on their priority list. For a potential roommate, I am one of many candidates. When things were at peak ridiculousness, it helped to remind myself that these are mostly good people simply acting on their incentives and priorities.
BEST OF WHAT I CONSUMED THIS WEEK
ARTICLE - The Atlantic: Why Kids Want Things by Joe Pinsker - Marsha Richins's research into materialism reveals a not-so-shocking insight that if we feel lacking in intangible value (e.g., skills, activities, relationships), we fall back on tangible, materialistic sources of value (e.g., clothes, car, salary, etc.). This insight resonated strongly with my past. I felt the waxing and waning of materialism as I started my career in business - high work volume jobs like consulting and private equity left little time for other skills and activities, so I became more and more fixated on tangible versions of value like salary and title and brands of what I owned. This can become a vicious cycle - if we are too convincingly led to believe in the value of those tangible things over the intangibles of life, we can become more and more obsessed with the tangible side. This can lead to working harder and harder to get more of the tangible, which inevitably leads to losing more and more of the intangibles that often matter most. Hungry ghost galore :D
My highlights:
I think of seventh grade as being the worst age of a person’s life. It’s really a fraught time, and there’s all this insecurity that kids have about Who am I? Do people like me? What kind of person am I? So how do we navigate that? Well, our appearance is one of the things we navigate with... Here we’re learning, right off the bat, that having things can help us define who we are.
So if kids have more things like athletic skills or activities that they can talk about or form connections with friends over those things, they can feel good about themselves through many different kinds of things. And if you’re lacking other kinds of things—if you’re lacking intangible resources—you might want to fall back on tangible resources.
...one of the most consistent findings is the association between the person’s current level of materialism and how they perceived their parents using things when they were growing up. So in other words, parents who act in ways that value things, parents who make a lot of sacrifices to get a lot of things, parents who get a lot of joy from buying things, parents who talk a lot about things—they tend to have adult children who act the same way.
I never thought it was a good idea to reward children tangibly for the things that they do, because I don’t think life works that way—there are a lot of things you have to do and you don’t get any reward for them. Your reward is you get to stay alive or you get to keep your job.
BLOG POST - Thoughts on Relationships by Tynan - A fun potpourri of relationship advice that complements and reaffirms (confirmation bias!!) my approach and principles across all types of relationships, inclusive of professional and friendship. (Note: I'm also single, so caveat emptor ;D)
My highlights:
...an absolute necessity for any good relationship is an environment of open non-judgmental communication. Relationships are complex enough without having severed communication lines. From the very beginning of the relationship, you should be communicating what you like, don't like, and expect. To do anything else is disrespectful.
It is always much better to get these things out early. Be honest and be open to rejection... Trust that your partner is mature enough to hear your perspective without freaking out.
You must also understand your partner's perspective as clearly as possible, even if you don't relate to it. It's one thing to disagree and understand, and another to disagree and think they're an idiot.
Make sure to keep an active life outside of your relationship. You can't be your partner's entire world and you don't want them to be yours. If you are both having fresh experiences, that's fresh oxygen being drawn into the relationship. You will (or at least should) appreciate your partner even more when you're around other people.
Make them feel secure, but challenge them. That's a fine line that requires you to let them know you are there for them no matter what, but also encourages them to grow and be even better.
ARTICLE - Aeon: Religion is about emotion regulation, and it’s very good at it by Stephen Asma - Stephen's piece reminds me of the need to live for things beyond ourselves: our family, our friends, our communities, our country (though technically a fiction, thanks Yuval), our species, our planet. Religion helps us with the community element in particular, with a variety of positive and negative impacts on the other webs of social relationships. I am not religious, but starting with Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, have come to see the positive value in specific elements of religion-like social bonding (and their analogues, like sports teams). That said, I am (perhaps naive and) optimistic in believing that we have other options for seeking out and coming together with others who have shared values (and which do not have as many negative externalities).
My highlights:
Religion, Durkheim argued, is a kind of social glue, a view confirmed by recent interdisciplinary research.
Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice.
Religion also helps to manage sorrow with something I’ll call ‘existential shaping’ or more precisely ‘existential debt’. It is common for Westerners to think of themselves as individuals first and as members of a community second, but our ideology of the lone protagonist fulfilling an individual destiny is more fiction than fact. Losing someone reminds us of our dependence on others and our deep vulnerability, and at such moments religion turns us toward the web of relations rather than away from it.
BLOG POST - The Best Way To Add Yield To Your Portfolio by Meb Faber - A wonderful application of opportunity cost to the subject of personal investing and financial returns. Focus on what you are amazing at, delegate the rest!
My highlights:
Lots of people study markets in the hopes of beating the market. What a lot of people don’t factor into their equation is the time spent to achieve that goal.
In nearly every case, it is a more realistic scenario to spend zero hours on investing, and simply work a few more hours and achieve a much higher yield on your entire portfolio. Only once you achieve family office levels of wealth does it make sense to be spending ANY time on your portfolio…The best way to add yield to a portfolio is to ignore it!
The current study suggests that exercise may slow or even reverse telomeric aging in a high stress group.
There were also significant reductions in body mass index and perceived stress and an increase in cardiorespiratory fitness (i.e., VO2peak) in the exercising caregivers versus controls.
MOST FAVORITE FROM THE PAST
BOOK - Principles by Ray Dalio (My blog post summary) - I discovered Ray and his legendary Principles PDF the first semester of business school, in fall of 2014, and his approach has stuck with me over the past four years. The man is relentless in his pursuit of objectively understanding himself and the world around him. While searching for problems and biases can seem negative at first glance, I consider his philosophy to be incredibly positive; if we are simply honest with ourselves about what is in the way of achieving our goals, we can solve the root causes and achieve what we set out to do.
My highlights (Note: From the original, free PDF edition):
I want you to think for yourself—to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what to do about it. I want you to do that in a clear-headed, thoughtful way, so that you get what you want.
Gaining strength is the adaptation process of the body and the mind to encountering one’s limits, which is painful… Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel the pain if you approach it correctly, because it will signal that you need to find solutions and to progress.
...you can get what you want out of life if you can open-mindedly reflect, with the help of others, on what is standing in your way and then deal with it.
I worked for what I wanted, not for what others wanted me to do. For that reason, I never felt that I had to do anything... What I wanted was to have an interesting, diverse life filled with lots of learning—and especially meaningful work and meaningful relationships.
I stress-tested my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong. I never cared much about others’ conclusions—only for the reasoning that led to these conclusions. Through this process, I improved my chances of being right, and I learned a lot from a lot of great people.
Character is the ability to get one’s self to do the difficult things that produce the desired results… the more you operate in your “stretch zone,” the more you adapt and the less character it takes to operate at the higher level of performance.
...the quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make. We aren’t born with the ability to make good decisions; we learn it… We literally make millions of decisions that add up to the consequences that are our lives.
You can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.
...you really should get excited about finding problems because identifying them will bring you closer to your goals.
...most of the movement toward your goals comes from designing how to remove the root causes of your problems.
I learned to love real integrity (saying the same things as one believes) and to despise the lack of it… how many people do you know who tell people what they really think?
I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learning… people who are interested in making the best possible decisions rarely are confident that they have the best possible answers.
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