Hey hey, whaddya say? Today is Tuesday! I’ve gathered some great reading for you today. Take a look!
Wealth and money are two different things. [Darius Foroux] — “Material wealth, which is acquired with money, is not the most important thing. Genuine wealth means freedom. Think about those people who have a lot of money but they can’t do the things they truly want. I wouldn’t call them wealthy. They are rich and have lots of money. But they’re not free.”
Nobody knows what’s going on. [Raptitude] — “This scenario, in which there’s much more wrongness going around than rightness, is probably the norm. People make bad inferences like that all day long. These wrong ideas replicate themselves whenever the person tells someone else what they know, which the internet makes easier than ever. Consider the possibility that most of the information being passed around, on whatever topic, is bad information, even where there’s no intentional deception.”
Brief interlude: Cain’s article hits upon something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. More and more, Reddit is being held up as some sort of paragon of reliable information (even by entities like Google). It’s just not the case. Reading the subreddits about which I have some knowlege, Reddit sometimes gets things right, but just as often it gets things wrong. Reddit isn’t a source of reliable information. It’s a popularity machine. The info that rises to the top (through upvotes) is the stuff that people want to be true, not the stuff that’s actually true. Sometimes there’s overlap. Often, there’s not.
And, in fact, this whole notion — the prevalence of false information on the interwebs — is a huge part of what led to me giving up on Get Rich Slowly. What’s the point? There’s so much bad money info out there (or pointless money info) that it felt like I was shouting into the void.
As I’ve come to believe that the internet does more harm than good in our society, its ability to amplify false information is one of the biggest problems. It used to be that there were active barriers to the spread of misinformation. It could spread, sure, but slowly. To truly have a voice, you had to pass through a gauntlet of knowledgable folks who controlled the means of mass communication. I realize that this created some system issues, but it also (largely) prevented problematic “info” from spreading like wildfire.
Anyhow, Cain’s article is a good exploration of this topic.
Semi-related:
Our mistaken ideas about what makes us happy. [Zen Habits] — “In the list above, of outward happiness activities, you might notice something — many of them are related to some inward experience. And that’s the most important thing — the real happiness comes from what’s happening inwardly.”
As usual, our final feature today has nothing to do with money. It’s simply one of my favorite videos from the past few weeks. In this case, it’s an 18-minute flip-through of the July 1967 issue of Seventeen magazine.
I love this. It’s one of my favorite videos I’ve found on YouTube. It manages to capture so many of the things that interest me right now: nostalgia, art, fashion, mid-century modern design, periodicals, pop culture, and more. I’ve watched it twice from start to finish, and I’ll probably watch it at least once more in the near future.
What’s more, I want to get a physical copy of this issue so that I can use some of the photos/illustrations as reference for drawing. So many cool things to draw!
(This video is but one of nearly 1500 similar magazine flip-throughs on the Casa Mia Vintage channel on YouTube.)