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The new luxuries of the 21st century
From time to time, we all resent & covet the luxuries of the ultra rich.
They are paraded in front of us in an endless feed of FOMO and envy-scrolling, in a bid to capture our attention and monetize our emotional currency.
But it makes me sad to think that the luxuries of my son’s generation will not be…
- supercars
- elite experiences
- second homes
- luxury handbags…
The the new “unaffordable luxuries” will be:
- having kids
- leisure time
- career choices
- unfettered attention
- mental health
When you start thinking of these things as the “ultra luxuries” how would you rank your wealth now?
What if AI…?
Add your own in the comments,
if you please…
What if all these companies laying off tens of thousands of employees replace them with AI bots?
What if the government is woefully unprepared to retrain or provide jobs for these people?
What if this leads to depression of wages?
What if the rising cost of living means it no longer pays off to have a fulltime job anymore?
What if this means we no longer have the disposable income to buy consumer goods and all the crap that we don’t need that keeps the economy afloat?
What if we shifted from consumerism to value long lasting products, community, quality and essentialism?
What if people are forced to combat the cost of living with supplementary self-sufficiency and community projects like self-growing, car sharing, offgrid living, self builds?
What if this means that instead of working for huge megacompanies, people start small micro or local businesses for a diversified multi stream “off grid” income?
What if AI bots leads to dead internet theory coming true, a collapse of trust on social media?
What if this meant a shift in digital marketing to focus on serving a small local or digital communities?
What of these businesses served and provided value in a much smaller community?
What if this value was exchanged through trade or cash?
What if this collapse of the consumer goods sector force government to rethink their tax and spending strategies to prioritize citizens instead of corporations?
What if we could use ai to relearn how to mend our own things, make our own things, create our things again?
What if it takes an ai revolution to make us realise that the truly important things happen offline?
Choose what to do next
You can do anything you want, you just can’t do everything you want
Every day you make a choice
Every day I get a little better.
Or a little worse.
I can default to the latter
Or I can choose consciously.
Habits make your life
Good (or bad) habits
=
A good (or bad) life
Don’t be happy when…
You don’t be happy WHEN.
most people think they’ll be happy WHEN.
“I’ll be happy WHEN I get that promotion,
“I’ll be happy WHEN I live in a bigger house”
“I’ll be happy WHEN I reach £10k/m”.
Life is problems.
Solve one and you’ll have more problems.
So if you wait until WHEN you’ll die waiting.
We are goal striving machines.
So you be happy WHILE you chase the goal
Money vs Wealth
Q What does Wealth mean to you?
freedom. Freedom from constraint. Freedom to make better wealth decisions and investments. Freedom from the raterace
Q What does money mean to you?
If you’d asked me this question first, I’d have responded as above.
However in the context of “wealth vs money” it changes how I think about it.
When you ask people about success, normally they equate it to career and monetary success.
It’s the same with wealth.
Wealth can mean more than just pointless endless accumulation of monetary assets.
I have a hunch most folk would be just as happy with stability and £60k as they would earning £100k.
After a certain point there’s not much difference so long as you have enough to live comfortably and afford some luxuries.
“Most people spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.” – Dave Ramsey
I’d add most people squander their time their time on things with no value,
glued to their lightboxes and dopamine hits.
So in this context, money is something I spend to buy time;
Time to spend on the things I enjoy.
Immediate (Design Hero funds my lifestyle (240k/yr)
Short-term (5 years) Building a scaleable business to sell digital products.
Long term (5 years+) Diversified wealth. Book sales. Content. Property. semi-passive businesses
I invest my money to buy time. I invest my wealth to buy stability and freedom.
A fastlane to the end of life?
Whenever I hit roadblocks, I think about “The Obstacle is the Way“.
The best walks aren’t just a straight line to the summit.
The real adventure starts when the bridge has collapsed and you have to cross the stream,
or the path is blocked and you make your own way.
We don’t rage at these detours on a hike.
The point of the hike is not to get to the end of the path, the point of the hike is to hike.
So why do we get so frustrated when these things happen in our business or life pursuits?
Do you want a shortcut straight to the end of your life?
No, you want a rich, varied life well lived and full of experiences.
This ties in nicely with my first thought regarding the perception of time passing.
Do you really want to join a fastlane straight to the end of your life?
A straight motorway to your death would be a very short and boring life indeed.
I must learn to enjoy the obstacles, the detours, the problems which make up the rich variety of life.
Obstacles might seem like a negative at the time, but they add up to the rich experience of life as a whole. Learn to embrace them.
Change is constant
That waterfall has been here for hundreds of thousands of years. probably since before the men were smashing each other with rocks on the prairies of Africa. Since forever.
But at some point in time, unfathomably long ago, that waterfall was just a stream. and before that it was a flat rocky plain.
beside the waterfalls are other falls carved in the rock, but now dry.
At some point in history the water followed that channel, then changed course and the rock was left behind.
Eventually that waterfall will carve another channel in the rock until it reaches a tipping point, then the river will suddenly change course again
ou think things are permanent, but they change. You might think your team, your job, your lifestyle is forever, but it’s not, it changes all the time!
Risk of death
We visited The Brother’s cave, and saw a genuine dinosaur footprint captured in the frozen rock. Awesome.
Immy was napping on a grass knoll with a view over the beach and lava fields,
so I set out to explore the rest of the beach and found a narrow ledge leading round to the cave with a sheer drop to water and rocks below.
I started along the ledge,
got further and further,
slime built up until it was slippy underfoot,
But when the handholds also started getting too slippy to hang onto I turned back.
I probably would be fine.
I thought about shimmying along the ledge even further.
Then I thought about the possibility of slipping off and ashing myself on the rocks. a slim possibility…
But why risk it!
I circled back round, went along the top of the cliff and peered down into the cave from above instead.
At the top of the cliff was a plaque for a tourist who’d died 2 years ago doing the same thing I did.
Plus it turns out I never would have had a view into the cave anyway, the ledge petered out just around the corner.
Yikes.
We all have different attitudes to risk.
It’s easy to assume if a risk has slim chance of coming true it won’t happen to us.
But it happened to someone.
If a risk is low-chance but high-impact, I usually avoid it.
Risk attitude: low likelihood with a low payoff, but big negative impact = not worth it.
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