The Vanderbilt fortune lasted about six generations.
Although, if you really think about it, it only lasted one generation. Because Cornelius was the only one who made the family any money. Everyone else just spent it.
Cornelius Vanderbilt grew his railroad empire and amassed a fortune that changed capitalism forever. He was the richest man in America; he took the tools of his time and made something magnificent out of them.
But he left his wealth to his children and his children’s children, and they squandered it. They built summer houses up and down the northeastern coast of the United States, and mansion after mansion in Midtown Manhattan. They collected art they didn’t appreciate and threw parties they didn’t want to be at. By the time a few generations had passed, opulence had spent away everything Cornelius ever earned.
But it wasn’t just opulence.
It was his children’s bad relationship with money and with progress. It was a fundamental misunderstanding of what advantages they'd been given, why those advantages exist, and what to do with them.
It was also a fundamental misunderstanding of the curses that come along with gifts. The ever-present trade-offs.
Sometimes you'll see polls that ask whether people think life will be better for the next generation than it was for their own. They’ll ask, "do you think the world is getting better and easier to live in?”
Cornelius Vanderbilt probably would have said yes, in regards to his own kids.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned from listening to wise people, is that the answer to this is always yes. If you are asked if the world is getting better, you should always answer yes.
I can live with that. But I would add some nuance.
The world is getting better at offering the opportunity to live better. The world is offering more flexibility around career options, geographical options, and mating options. The world is getting better at offering more advantages around how you construct your life.
But that’s all the world is doing. Offering. We still have to do something with that offer. We still have to construct our lives.
Along with these gifts come a million forms of temptation. For every step forward we take, there are two new ways to step backwards. For every new technology or privilege we have access to, there are new ways for it to poison us.
Unfortunately, the baseline behavior of a human being is not robust adaptation. It’s some adaptation. It’s a little bit of adaptation. Our default behavior is to use some of the advantage and fall victim to most of the poison.
When people say that life is “getting better,” it’s only true if the person they’re talking about is a highly-adaptive person who actually understands the tradeoffs that come with progress.
With each passing decade, what it takes to be a happy and fruitful person, a spiritually healthy person, is getting more rare. Not less rare.
Why? Because it’s so easy not to be.
People say that America is the best country in the world. “You have nothing but advantages,” they’ll say. Well, maybe. It depends entirely on what you mean by best, and by advantages. We have the highest obesity rate in the history of the world, and life expectancy is declining for the first time in our nation's 300 years. We have more people on pills than we have people who read a book a month. We have more people on Netflix than we have people who get one hour of exercise a week. Half the men under 25 in this country don’t even have the courage to ask a woman out. Our suicides are high, our divorce rates are high, our community engagement is low.
But is the U.S. also the best place to start a business? Yes. Is the U.S. also the best place to play Middle Class Monopoly and escape from the game forever? Yes, without a doubt.
Our advantages are merely technological and financial. We are the Vanderbilts.
So what’s missing?
A real advantage is having two parents who love us, a community to support us, and a culture that believes in more than efficiency.
A real advantage is being taught how to say no to things that aren't good for us. A real advantage is someone helping us find the will to live effectively in the modern world.
Instead, we settle for faster phones and less time doing manual labor. And we call that an advantage.
We have fast food. We can go 100 different places within 10 miles of home, and purchase a bag of dinner. We see this as an advantage. And, sure, that’s a modern convenience. But it comes with the price of that food being literal poison.
We have access to all of the information ever created. That’s an advantage. The price is, we are attacked by all of the opinions of everyone alive right now, and half of those who are dead.
Our healthcare is incredible. But if you use it, you’ll go bankrupt.
We can access extended family on Facebook. But all they post about is politics and cats.
The misconception about advantages is: they are only advantages if the world doesn’t also demand payment for them. If technology saves you 10% of your free time, but then your life gets 10% busier, you did not save any time. All you did was increase the momentum of your life. That’s often what progress is, and it’s what older folks often misunderstand — progress is not free shit. It still has a price. Whether it be our time, our health, our mental well-being, or our relationships, progress always sends a bill.
And that bill is getting paid, whether we do so willingly or not.
It’s hard to use any modern convenience without it using us. It takes a lot of will (and, in the case of healthcare, luck) not to swallow the poison along with the benefit.
We have advantages, but we don’t understand what they are, why we have them, or what to do about it.
Here’s a graph I made that compares the poisons and temptations in our lives to our Will — our strength of character and our ability to resist them. Maybe we can call it the Progress-Will Index.
The red line (the progress line) represents advancement in technological norms, culture, and consumerism — and the simultaneous increase in our access to various temptations or harms. It’s impossible to separate the two — they come in one box. The red line represents the availability of comfort, convenience, and dopamine. The red line is the Vanderbilt line.
The green line represents how we collectively adapt to these advancements over time. But that line doesn't increase as fast as the red line. Because, although we get better at recognizing temptations and poisons, and we also get better at seeing advantages, it is very hard to adapt to them as fast as they develop. Frankly, it’s very hard to do anything about them at all. Again — life does not simply “get” better. It leaves us behind. The green line, ironically, is also the Vanderbilt line.
The blue line represents a strong-willed person who is good at adapting. Good at recognizing these benefits, temptations and poisons, and doing something about them. Which means using what’s good and either ignoring or working around what isn’t.
The blue line is someone who uses Twitter only for education, and eats natural foods.
The green line is someone who uses Facebook for news, and eats processed foods.
Both know better. The blue line is just better at doing something about it.
But the blue line will never go up quite as fast as the red line. Because very few people are perfect at adapting to an advancing world. We all succumb to some of the temptations of modern life.
The only people who aren’t below the red line would be monks. Because they are absolutely divorced from change and technology — the outside world does not influence how they live at all.
The rest of us are somewhere below the red line.
The idea of the Index is this: the world changes faster than human Will does. The world presents trade-offs to us faster than we can learn what to do with them.
The higher your score — the higher your adaptation — the more alive you are in the modern world. We can pay the bill of progress by having the will to keep up. By using the advantages and working around the poisons.
The problem is, it’s harder to score higher because our relationships have changed.
Our relationships to each other, and to time, money, and food have changed.
We’ve all seen countless articles explaining how our relationships with each other are worse than ever — we are more emotionally isolated, more polarized, and we have fewer friends than any generation before us. So I’m not going to detail those things here. At this point, they’re obvious.
There are many reasons why obesity is so high, physical and mental health outcomes are so poor, and we have fewer friends than ever before. There are many reasons why we seem to be living worse, despite our baseline of opportunity going higher.
One reason is food consumerization. Our local supermarkets receive truckloads of food that has been frozen, processed, and bastardized, but healthy food is a destination purchase. We have to go somewhere special and pay extra for food that hasn’t been fucked with. Because food that hasn’t been fucked with is less profitable for Nestle and Kraft-Heinz.
To some extent, we can't afford to eat healthy.
Another reason is that our lives are busier but we aren't accomplishing as much with our time as we should be. A lot of our time is wasted in low-output activities like commuting, keeping up with relatively useless social networks, and going through automated customer-service systems that belong in Hell.
We are obsessed with having down time. We modern people feel that we are above things like all-day grocery shopping, and driving to the next town to get quality ingredients. I mean, what are we, peasants? Well... peasants probably ate healthier than we do.
And our relationship with money has changed. We spend our whole lives saving for retirement now. Until the Industrial Revolution, people frequently lived in multi-generational homes. Whoever was of working age took care of whoever was not. That is, parents would take care of both the kids and the grandparents, wherever possible. And they'd all live together.
Today, we all live alone. Our parents are in retirement homes because we no longer want them around interfering with our convenient lives. Our selfish routines and our nuclear families.
200 years ago, the average person spent almost all of their money eating and securing shelter and clothing. Today, we put away a huge chunk of our income paying for our retirement, since our kids aren't going to (and neither is our employer or the government); we also spend huge chunks of our income paying for bills that did not even exist 200 years ago. Or 50 years ago.
The average person 200 years ago did not have to get wealthy just to retire. We do. Therefore we forgo things that are better for us, today, because they’re more expensive.
Our relationship with money has changed — our money exists more for the future (and for quasi-forced consumer expenditures) than ever before. It's more expensive, proportionally, to do things like eat healthy in the present or do something worthwhile with money.
Hyper-financialization and hyper-consumerization drag us all downwards on the Index. It’s more expensive to form good habits, both financially and emotionally (and even time-wise), because most options available to the average worker and consumer are not good options. They’re poison. They’re McDonald’s and Instagram and 300-dollar extended warranties on products that aren’t good in the first place.
Everything in the modern world is designed to take from us, and give us less and less in return.
But perhaps the biggest reason we’re all struggling so much… is just because our Will does not advance as quickly as progress does.
What I think will happen, is happening, is a bigger and more striking difference between those who can adapt and those who can't. In the same way that capitalist democracy tends to lead to a wealth gap over time, I think increasingly extreme technology will lead to an adaptation gap. Those who can live properly with it will be light-years ahead of those who are consumed by it. It will create almost a two-tier culture. If you're Nietzschean, it will deepen the "masters and slaves" distinction.
I am pessimistic at the level of the collective, but optimistic at the level of the high-adapt individual.
Now picture that mythical day when our homes are all filled with robots that do anything we tell them to.
You're going to have to score incredibly high on this index to be a happy and fruitful person. It's going to take a heroic effort just to get out of bed and go do something that used to be normal. Used to be good for us. Just to go mow the lawn or go shopping. Because it’s so easy not to.
Even those of us who know better get trapped into picking up our phones and doing things we know we shouldn’t be doing.
“I’ll just scroll for 15 minutes before I take a shower,” we’ll tell ourselves before scrolling for 45.
“I’ll just have fast food for these extenuating circumstances,” we’ll tell ourselves 8 times a month.
“I’ll just watch this one political video, even though I really don’t care,” we’ll tell ourselves before suddenly having a violent opinion about it.
One reason for this is that we just can’t help ourselves. We simply aren’t good at managing temptation.
Another reason is that we swear we’re not as bad as everybody else, so we can get away with little bits of it. I understand how bad social media is for me, and therefore I’m kind of immune to it.
False.
Every single thing we do affects our score on the Index. It’s like a credit score: you miss just one payment, and your outlook is worse than it was yesterday. And the more times you do it, the longer it takes to recover.
The people on the blue line are people who never eat at McDonald’s. Who never doom-scroll on Instagram.
That’s not to say that wise, high-adapt people don’t ever give in to temptation. They do. But they don’t give in to temptations that they’ve already conquered. Once they understand the trade-offs of a particular aspect of life, they don’t make the trade anymore. They learn those trade-offs more quickly, and they do something about them.
People on the blue line do things like:
Open up a no-fee brokerage account to invest instead of gambling on stocks
Use social media to make useful connections with people, instead of competing with them
Use technology to save time on chores and spend that time with their brother or sister
Use Twitter as an educational app instead of a political one
Search the internet for classic game theory articles instead of porn
Use YouTube to search for useful videos, not browse for useless ones
Spend the time they save feeding their family better foods
People on the blue line see the advantages and the temptations for what they are — and they distill out the advantages. The same way you distill moonshine — you process it until you’re left with pure ethanol, no methanol.
The cynical response to all of this is, “well yea of course rich people can afford to spend their time eating healthier and avoiding working-class temptations.”
But the reason those people are rich is because they did these things when they were poor. They could have made excuses and had a party, but they didn’t. They read a book.
As we learned from the Vanderbilts, you can't give someone advantages without exposing him to temptations. They’re the same thing. That family was given one of the biggest fortunes in the history of the world, and it rotted them.
Because they didn’t understand the advantages they were given, why they exist, or what to do with them.
People keep talking about AI like it's going to deliver us from something. Like the progress of AI is going to "think" us to a better way of living.
No no. A better way of living is behind us, not in front of us. We've been there and forgotten it.
Drink some water and be grateful. Careful, but grateful.
Happy Thanksgiving.
JDR
“Between man and virtue the gods have placed sweat.” - Simon Sarris
I'm not American, but if there is one thing I wish for you guys, it is that more of you would cook at home and start talking to your neighbors.
You never miss do you?