There's always a better towel

But the choice is less time

This weekend, I took my best friend Stefan’s son B. to the National Knife Day, a fair showcasing local Portland knifemakers’ work. The level of knowledge and craftsmanship was unreal.¹ And so were the prices. I was planning to get B. a knife for his 14th birthday, something around $100, but there was nothing under $300 (prices went up to $30,000).

I took him out for pizza instead.

Nice $10,000 knife!

This morning on our dog walk, Stefan asked me how the show was. I told him that it was beautiful but it’s hard to imagine buying a $600 kitchen knife unless you were a professional chef or had money to burn.²

But that’s the thing with capitalism, you can always get a better thing, something that’s “worth” the extra cost given the labor and care that went into making it. We make some beautiful things in this world.

Aspirations

My friend Jonathan is a marketer. He’s the guy who large multinational corporations hire to get people to buy things they don’t need. He’s good at it and makes a lot of money doing it. Jonathan told me once that basically all purchases are aspirational: it’s the hope that by buying a thing will let you become a certain type of person.

• If I buy this $600 knife, I’ll be a person who cooks more.

• If I buy this $4,000 bike, I’ll be a person who goes riding more.

• If I buy this $100,000 Sprinter van/sailboat/second home, I’ll be a person who gets into nature more.

Most often, people never do the thing, because well, the thing takes time, and the one thing that capitalism doesn’t give you is time. People spend their time (ie lives) on earning enough to buy the best thing to do the thing but then don’t have time to do the thing.

Ironic.

Sad.

A side story about the Achilles

In 2022, I was laid up with my torn Achilles. Because I couldn’t be physically active, I spent the year taking care of a bunch of small tasks, including sending some clothing back for repairs to the high-end outdoor clothing manufacturer Arcteryx. How I got these clothes is a long, involved story³ but the point of it was that Arcteryx came back to me and said that some of the items couldn’t be repaired and offered me a $900 store credit to replace them.

I spent the next three months obsessively perusing the Arcteryx outlet store, reading an obscene amount of gear reviews, and talking to customer service an unhealthy number of times.⁴ My friends, used to me being virulently anticonsumerist, thought I was in a fugue state.⁵ What I realized afterwards is that, because I had a torn Achilles, I was shopping for the thing I wished I could do. Because I couldn’t be physically active, I used all my energy imagining it, through shopping.⁶

I think capitalism has a lot of that. People imagining doing something, through shopping, while they spent the majority of most active years working. Jonathan, you evil bastard.

Time over towels

80s supermodel Lauren Hutton had a great phrase:

"There is always a better towel.''

Babe

What’s a good enough towel? What’s a good enough knife? Capitalism has an infinite capacity to produce a better thing, because better things is what capitalism is good at.

But the cost is having less time. As our dear friend Vicki Robin tells us: the basic exchange is we trade our life energy (i.e. time) for money and vice versa. You can spend most of your life working and end up having very little time doing the things you wanted with your time. I know a lot of people who spend a very little time in their gorgeous homes.

I always tell people about my uncle dying of ALS at age 64 and telling me “I have one last piece of advice for you: Don’t wait for anything.” A little more detail to that story. When he said, “Don’t wait for anything,” his next sentence was:

“I waited my entire life to do things, and now I can’t.

I knew what he meant. For years he had watched the PBS show Rick Steves’ Europe, waiting until retirement to take my aunt there. My uncle was born in a family of ardent Chinese Nationalists, who fled the Communists to Taiwan. He had never stepped foot in his homeland. He had been waiting all his life and was planning on going to China when he retired.

He died two months before his 65th birthday.

Don’t wait for anything.

One of the major justifications for Die with Zero is that you’ll stop working earlier, giving you more life during your “go-go” years instead of your “no-slow” or “no-go” years. But you don’t even know if you’re going to have that. My uncle never went to Europe, or China. My uncle could have retired 10 years earlier, if he prioritized time over towels.

How many more summers? This shit is precious. Don’t chase the more beautiful items when you could chased the more beautiful life. The life that bubbles up within you that you’ve had to tamp down. The life that Life/Love is asking you to have.

Don’t wait for anything. Even those of you with “good,” socially redeeming jobs, which is quite frankly the majority of this readership. My friend and mentor Matthew Englehart, the first question when he teaches mysticism is: "What is the taste of an orange?" Without tasting an orange, you can't actually know what an orange tastes like. You can put it into AI (I just did) and get a description of the taste of an orange but it’s useless unless you’ve tasted an orange. Similarly, it's like trying to describe sex to a virgin. Or a NDE. Or psychedelics. Reading or viewing the experience of Europe through Rick Steves doesn't replace going to Europe. Expand that to the entire experience of being alive in the world, about truly caring about someone or something so much that you'd be willing to sacrifice your life for her/it, and you see the limitations of this commoditized experience we’re having.

Don’t trade your life for nicer towels. Don’t imagine the life you want. Find a way.

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” ― Edward Abbey⁷

Newsletter reader Zoom get-together September 7

By popular vote, our Zoom get-together for newsletter readers is Sunday September 7, 10am PST. I’m excited for this! I rarely get to talk to readers. And those of you who responded for that date are awesome. Here’s the link. Hope to see you there!

1. I love talking to people about their subject of mastery, so going to these sort of events is a real pleasure.

2. He reminded me that I do have money to burn, ha

3. Hi Harsha!

4. I think they were annoyed. I would have been too.

5. On my 50th birthday dinner that year, people came “dressed as Douglas” and about a third people wore Arcteryx jackets (other interpretations were ratty soccer clothing, bowties, and pajamas).

6. My friend Victor (hi!) told me that Arcteryx has three main audiences: hardcore adventurists, Silicon Valley techies who want “the best" gear for their once-a-year trips, and rich old Asian people who want light, warm clothing for around town. When I went to the Arcteryx outlet store in Vancouver BC and saw all the old Asian people…. I stopped buying Arcteryx.

7. I’m pretty sure Edward Abbey did not have “the best gear.”