Living your life.
Let's stop reducing humanity down to nothing more than the stock market.
James wrote a post on LinkedIn this week which I want to share in full:
I hate this stupid advice about not buying a house because it doesn’t make financial sense
It’s the most empty vacuous life advice I’ve ever heard
Whilst you’re at it.
Don’t buy your morning coffee either. Or an almond croissant. Don’t buy Christmas presents for loved ones!
Put that money in your stocks and shares ISA as well.
When you want to look around you and see what you’ve achieved, when you want to feel safe comfortable and warm- load up vanguard instead and stare at it.
See if you can pick Cooking Apple Green for your investment dashboard background.
Try knocking a nail into the S&P 500 to hang up that print you like.
My god why does everything in this world have to be so clinical, so optimised, so perfectly rational.
A house is a home. A place to be. A place to live and love. Not everything has to be an asset!
I understand the sentiment, in the cold light of an excel spreadsheet it makes complete sense. But read the room - have some actual emotion for once.
Your life is not your money. You are not a robotic potential realisation machine.
Can we hear some life advice that isn’t centred around growing your investments 6% a year please.
What about memories and people. Family and friends. Good food, music, art - the garden, nature. 🌲 🌳
Buy a house, don’t use Claude, don’t wear a whoop, don’t track your resting HR.
Do whatever you want.
Do what makes you feel alive.
Live!
Don’t listen to random blokes on the internet pedalling narrow minded life advice to you 🙏🏻
I didn’t know what he’d written or what he was going to share, so I was reading it fresh, and it struck a chord with me.
I’m so tired and bored of the lifeless, cold nonsense that’s getting peddled around social media.
The entrepreneurs who keep telling everyone to quit the 9-5 grind and setup their own companies.
The people saying owning a home is worthless.
The ones saying you’re wasting your life if you’re watching Netflix, not their YouTube course (which you have to buy for £997).
Too many of these messages lack any nuance. They are (often) individuals projecting their own desires (and insecurities) onto others, forgetting, of course, that what works for one doesn’t work for another.
It’s worth considering everything. Maybe a house purchase isn’t right for you. Maybe you are watching a bit too much Netflix. Maybe you aren’t happy in your 9-5.
But life is more complex and complicated than a 60-second video someone has whacked up on Instagram.
Many of these people are well-intentioned, sure.
But by making things so absolute and black-and-white, they are feeding into the guilt and comparison problem, even if they don’t mean to.
Someone who is wired to setup their own business, spent decades building it and making millions, then shouting at their phone that others “must” do the same isn’t always helpful advice.
Take me for example. I work for myself. I personally hate the 9-5 and I hate working for other people. My partner is the complete opposite, she has a stable 9-5 that she loves. If I came home and tried to “influence” her to “follow her dreams”, she’d tell me where to stick my well-meaning advice.
At the same time, while I love independence, I’m not an entrepreneur. I have no desire to setup a business and hire people. It’s not how I’m built. It’s why I’ve found social media more and more draining in the last few years.
It feels like success, particularly for men, is measured by how many companies you’ve setup and exited, and how fat the stack of cash was at the end of it. That’s the goal for some people, and that’s genuinely fine, IF that’s what’s right for you.
But we can’t forget to live life in the small things too. Life doesn’t happen in the major life events, although that’s what we always seem to aim for. The major life events are so fleeting and occasional, that we have to remember that life happens in the every day.
The phonecall we say we don’t have time for. The house we own which we’re excited to come back to. The morning coffee.
There’s time for the stock market and the self-development and all that.
But there’s time for just being a human being too.
And doing it in the way that feels most human for you.
We’re called human “beings” for a reason, not human “doings”.
George x
I whole-heartedly agree with this. I know we need to take care of our pennies, but life is for living. I spent a large amount of money on doing up my house, that's not an investment financially, that's an investment in the quality of our lives and the space we choose to live in.